In this month’s issue
A lot is assumed about what won’t happen when learners are granted control of their learning: grades won’t be sustained, behaviour standards won’t be upheld, kids won’t do anything; instead, chaos will reign. So, this month we focus on the kids and what does happen when they have very little control of their learning, which is the standard experience of school for most.
Bevan looks at the idea of compliance and wonders if it’s all it’s cracked up to be.
We spotlight some passages from John Holt’s book How Children Fail.
Our guest writer this month is a Year 12 student, Isabella Gillanders, who peels back the curtain on her secondary school experience. I wonder if you’ve heard variations of her story before?
The live chat round-up selects some ‘choice’ moments from the discussions about love and curiosity.
The monthly issue is free to anyone. Go ahead, share it widely.
Whispers from the frontier
“As long as the children are well-behaved and a teacher is getting decent results, their pedagogy can go unexamined. This is all very well if the only thing we care about are the grades.” Yes, quite right, Mr Claxton.
As an aside, Guy Claxton is doing a virtual keynote at the SUPERHEROES conference hosted by Learning Network NZ on 4 September. Register now at this link.
And I highly recommend Guy’s book Powering Up Students – The Learning Power Approach to Secondary Teaching, which will feature in the reading spotlight section in next month’s issue. But don’t wait for then. Just take my word for it and buy your copy now.
Interested in wellbeing? You’ll find value in this introduction to Nel Nodding’s work on the ethics of care.
Is education a complex or complicated endeavour? The question is more significant than you think.
Head here for some practical tips about how to foster creativity in kids.
Guest writer
This month, we hear from a Isabella Gillanders, a Year 12 student. She writes about how school is for her. It’s a story I stumbled across as I was in her class and was talking with her. In my experience, while powerful, it’s a story that’s more common than we like to admit.
Schooling depends on obedience and not on learning. Learning is when you act on the natural human impulse to make sense of the world around you. In contrast schooling is adults/teachers judging you on how well you can do what you're told. I feel as if the traditional practices are being instilled in peers of mine, the myth that teachers are superior and have the right and final judgement over everything. However this is not the case and the same amount of respect students exert should be the same as the teacher, which would create an environment of trust and safeness for students to learn. What teachers as a whole have done is abuse the authority they have to make students feel less and comply to standards.
Natural learning is when you follow curiosity. I know how a leaf feels because I wanted to touch one out of curiosity, this itself is learning because I sought out the information on what a leaf felt like which helped me to further understand how the world works. Learning isn't just limited to literal and logical but spacial, social, emotional and so on.
School keeps students on a narrow track through the constant tests, grading, deadlines schedule, extrinsic rewards, and school rules: “the staircase of school” to keep students in line. A normal NCEA standard led through by a teacher in class would typically have the following “staircase”:
intro to standard and deadline set,
assessment criteria and exemplars are given,
materials is given to work towards the standard,
marks are given and move towards the next standard,
I personally have found that this was like a staircase, with steps to “guide” up to the standard that the teacher tries to provide students to move the class at the same speed.
To me this feels like caring for a mature puppy. This shows that schools have no trust in students as they don’t believe students will seek out their own learning, which in fact they do. The system’s response to this is a strict limited “pathway” by manipulating us that there is only one pathway, disregarding personal interests (making every single student compulsorily do the same standards), and removing individuality, (with uniform, shutting down students). The school system begins to break students' curiosity, engagement and enthusiasm in their learning by keeping students on the narrow track of which they must comply and be obedient to.
Schools should embrace individuals and not think of us as an ID number.
I know that often when something interesting pops up, whether it be on the web or in convo, my peers and I further seek out answers to our own questions out of interest, and this helps me build understanding. School isn't the only form of how we gain understanding and judgement but rather a small portion. Because of how school is laid out in fact I see often that we have to gain more intelligence outside of school eg. the social space. Schools keep us on the narrow strict track because few students have self motivation for any of the work set. Whereas if schools allowed students to create a pathway of learning for themselves through self interests they would have more motivation to do work in the first place and would be able to navigate their lives better. Self motivation leads to self discipline, rather than discipline from being conformed to be obedient. If schools asked students to write a list of things they don't know, want to know, want to learn, and challenged students to learn these things students would then gain initiative for their own learning rather than always being babysitted towards credits.
A school with less instructions and one way fits all type of learning, and more freedom, will ensure the growth and development of individual students. But I imagine to adults that have to abide by this society where we are constantly put in boxes this may seem like a wild jungle. But I believe that being disobedient and defiant to rules that put boundaries around us is what makes adolescents so great. A theoretical school like this would allow students to learn to work for themselves and find their own identity through the experiences they choose.
An environment where teachers are no longer instructors but are rather there as guidance and support through these developing years will also gain more respect from both sides, as in this dynamic students would have more respect for teachers as they would be actually helping them learn rather than instructing a kid to remember something. I myself am dyslexic and have always struggled throughout school and if someone asked me to recommend a book that would make them cry, I’d recommend Scipad, because I just can't learn from that style of teaching. And I have begun to realise that school has nothing to do with intelligence but how lazy you are, as me and my peers, in order to get good marks, just have to practice writing what the NCEA schedule wants us to say. Which this is sad for me to say as I'm already unconsciously conforming, so in my end year exams I don't want to conform and fill up the whole exam book to get the best grades possible. Instead I'd rather leave the papers entirely blank to make the marker’s job easier.
Isabella offers us a challenge here, and that’s to think about what we do that might place the focus on learning and growth for the majority of our kids, instead of progress and achievement.
If any of you want to make contact with Isabella, she is happy for you to email her at isabella.gillanders1@gmail.com
Theory on my mind
All teachers dream of it right, a room full of nicely ordered students, heads down working diligently on the task set with, at most, a quiet ‘hum’. And of course from there springs a steady stream of students completing the task with pleasing results: the very thing the teacher was looking for. When this happens we say things like
“These kids are really engaged in their learning.”
Or
“They worked so hard and did so well!”
And on one level that’s true. When kids are like this they are engaged. But it’s important to think about the nature of their engagement, because for most it’s not the kind of engagement that springs from joy and discovery; instead it’s more like the sort of engagement we might associate with an appointment. It’s engagement rooted in obligation, not willingness, in other words.
But what it actually is is compliance. Now, compliance is fine when filing a claim with your insurance company, but as a way to live it’s not ideal, right?
Jackson and Zmuda draw a distinction between compliant and engaged learners. Compliant learners, they say
“follow directions, diligently complete assignments, and get good grades mostly because of their effort or adherence to directions”
School, as a system, is set up to promote compliance and things being done the right way. Diligence, effort and adherence are what’s sought by most schools. Just read the guest piece this month as a lived example. But surely we need to be more ambitious than this. Surely, if schools are about learning, we need to do more than reward those who are happy to have their learning controlled.
Engaged learners, Jackson and Zmuda say, don’t look like compliant ones. These learners
“tend to focus on the learning and share their thoughts unprompted, without consideration for those around them. Straightforward questions bore them, but questions that are personally relevant or that require teasing out ambiguity fascinate them. These learners take risks; they’re not afraid to try something new.”
How often are these types of learners seen as ‘difficult’? They’re the ones who say things like, “Maybe,” or “Can I do this instead?” or “I disagree,” or “I’m not done yet,” or “I want to do it my way,” or (perhaps the worst of them all) “I don’t want to do that.” But this is real engagement isn’t it, an engagement borne of willingness and curiosity, not obligation.
Erik Erikson can help us see why these learners, the truly engaged ones, shouldn’t be seen as difficult. He argues, for instance, that kids who are given the freedom and opportunity to test knowledge develop initiative and self-assurance. The contrast is the kid who is “restricted or made to feel that they are engaging in a ‘silly’ or ‘wrong’ activity, making a mess or taking up too much time … may develop a sense of guilt over self initiated activities that will persist.” What Erikson stressed was the importance of children being active and in control, and that the development of autonomy was something schools should encourage and focus on. Kids should be allowed to make decisions, make a mess, be supported to have an impact on the world even if it leads to mistakes.
We want people who can think critically, who can express themselves, who have a drive to do things. We want people who are willing to engage with the world. And what we are talking about here is people having control. There must be opportunities for kids to practice having control, just as there are opportunities for them to practice their spelling lists so they can do well on the spelling test, but the fact is most kids in school get lots of the latter and little of the former. It might get good test results, but there’s a hidden cost to compliance that’s borne by kids: mistrust, doubt, guilt, inferiority, confusion, isolation, self-absorption, despair. Those are Erikson’s words, not mine.
Reading Spotlight
In an issue looking at what happens to kids in school, John Holt is the perfect choice for the reading spotlight. Now, usually I like to thread some commentary through some select parts of the book being spotlighted, but when I went digging through How Children Fail I found something on every page that screamed at me for inclusion. So, the one real piece of commentary I have regarding this book is for you to go and buy it!
“If we look at children only to see whether they are doing what we want or don’t want them to do, we are likely to miss all the things about them that are the most interesting and important … Thus, when I learned from hearing her talk to her friends, that one of my students loved horses, I was able to help her with her “reading problem” by putting within her reach a copy of National Velvet. She loved it, as I thought she would, and her love for the story and the people in it gave her the desire and strength to overcome her “reading problem” - which was mostly the fear that she really couldn’t learn to read, and the shame she would feel if this proved to be true.”
In other words (I can’t help myself here, having written this quote out), she was in a state one student described to me recently as ‘closed off to learning’ because of how she felt about herself as a learner. And this happens, this student told me, because kids go through years being told their work isn’t good enough.
“Practically everything we do in school tends to make children answer-centered. In the first place, right answers pay off. Schools are a kind of temple of worship for “right answers”, and the way to get ahead is to lay plenty of them on the altar … Thus one ironical consequence of the drive for so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too busy to think.”
Our student guest this month makes almost exactly the same point about NCEA.
“Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t … You can do this the old-fashioned way, openly … Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly”
How many kids fear what will happen to them if they don’t pass the next assessment?
“There is a very simple question that hardly anyone seems to have asked. Of the things we teachers do, which help learning and which prevent it? The reason we so seldom ask the question is that we tend to assume that unless there’s something wrong with the student, all teaching produces learning, so that all we need to think about is what children should be made to learn.”
Live chat round-up
This month’s chats have been lively and invigorating. We have explored the place of love in learning and how curiosity might be fostered and sustained in school. Here are some comments from the participants that are worth repeating.
On love:
“I think some children haven't perhaps found their passion so they are still exploring but I can certainly see certain children in my class who already have that thing they love. Part of our role is to offer opportunities for children to find the things that they love. That means offering a wide curriculum.”
“When a learner is passionate about what they are learning they set their own path. Just as with your cricket story - it doesn't matter what others are doing or where they are going- a passionate and engaged learner will keep on going”
“i see a shift by the end of high school from creativity and curiosity to productivity . Students self worth is measured from a different angle, and their love of learning suffers as a consequence.”
On curiosity:
“I doubt we are all curious about the same things? Therefore it seems to make sense to be learning about the things that do interest us, our passions...or as we discussed last week...the things we love. Is it that William Blake poem that starts 'To see a World in a grain of sand"? Well, that had an impact on me, everything we do in interlinked so does it really matter if we travel a different journey ?”
“Or one of my favourite examples which highlight curiosity is when i intentionally leave lab equipment out, the next class who have no idea what the purpose of the objects are frequently show a higher degree of curiosity then those who it was meant for”
“Well, I think that is why I like play because you can put out some provocations/invitations and then stand back and watch what the kids explore. What interests them, when you see that puzzled look on their face, when they start mixing things to see what results and they wonder about things. Doing things to simply see what happens and hearing "wow' or "look at that". I'd say that invention comes out of curiosity ...and creativity too.”
Want to be a part of the discussion each week, or even just watch from the sidelines? The live chat is available exclusively to paid subscribers, which could be you! The Smata Bulletin costs less than $1/week if you pay for an annual subscription. At that price you don’t even have to sacrifice a coffee each week to become part of the collective!
Thanks for reading this month’s issue. I hope you found in it something to ignite a fire.
Many teachers, for whom these ideas resonate, find a huge barrier is that of tracking the learning and showing progress. The Smata app is designed to solve that problem. It’s quick and simple to use, and we offer a 1 month trial. Check it out.