Letting Go

Wiggins’s (2014) blog presents an authentic representation of what is happening in schools today. I teach interrelated special education students in a small group setting, and I find myself guilty of probably helping out my students more than I should. Although I do catch myself helping when the students should be working on their own, I feel like the students’ attitudes are also partially to blame. I have seen it more this year than ever before. The students at our school seemed to have become so entitled. They feel like, if they cannot solve a problem, we should be at their beck and call to answer it for them. Sometimes, we play into this mindset, which encourages it. I also feel that a student’s home life contributes to this mindset. For example, if a child’s parents do everything for them, then they expect the same treatment when they get to school. It seems sometimes that this generation has not had to struggle as much through figuring out problems for themselves – especially with technology so readily available these days. Therefore, teaching has had to take a turn, and now – as Chris Lehmann states in the Connected Learning (2014) webinar – “what we’re really teaching in the Information Age (when a kid who has an iPhone in their pocket has more access to information than a teacher has in their head), we’re teaching them wisdom.”

Wiggins’s (2014) parallels to coaching really drove points home for me. I coach competitive cheerleading, and although it is nothing like soccer, I am able to relate to his stories. In cheerleading, a team practices for months then competes. Whatever the team puts out on the mat for the two and a half minutes that it is out there is all that it has; there is no coaching that can be done to help during the actual competition. A coach and team give the best that they have, and then it is over. For a coach, preparing a squad for something like this can be hard. A coach is always there during practice and can correct the cheerleaders’ mistakes and give them advice, but anything could happen in an actual competition when a coach can only stand by and watch. In past years, I have started to take a step back at practices leading up to our exhibitions. I remind my cheerleaders that, regardless of what happens in practice, they need to keep going in competition. If something goes wrong and the team practices how to “save” it, then the team will know how to handle that issue if it arises during competition. As Wiggins (2014) states, “the more coaches and teachers prompt/remind/scaffold, over and over, without a deliberate and explicit plan for release of responsibility, the more students will flounder in situations demanding autonomy.”

            I know that I teach a different set of students than most teachers, so I am not saying that our entire school body is like this, but it has been like pulling teeth to get my students to work independently without any help from my paraprofessional or me. I tell the students that I want them to work on their own so that, when I go over the problems later, they can see where they went wrong and what they would need to fix the next time they did the problem. Sometimes, it seems that all that the students seem to hear is “I don’t have to get these problems right, and she will tell me the answers later.” It drives me crazy. I have struggled this year getting my students to work independently and try to solve problems on their own because that is what life is all about – trying to make things work on one’s own and solving problems along the way to survive.

            One problem I see though is all of the information that has to be taught and how teachers and students are being evaluated. I truly believe that relationships are important to build with students at the beginning of the year, but I also know that I must jump on teaching my students the standards that are being tested in late April or early May. These are the scores that they will discuss when looking at my growth rate as a teacher. This is hard when teaching special education. Sure, they get accommodations, but that does not mean that I have any more actual time to teach them the material; it just means that I have less time to play the games and do the extra activities that I would like to do. If administrators were less worried about the strict rubric that they have to grade teachers by, teachers would be more willing to step out of the box and create fun activities to get the students engaged and learning. Ian O’Byrne raises the point of training teachers to be adaptive to new situations, stating, “the role of the teacher–and, in many ways, the role of student–has to change as well. How do we build the teachers that we need to for this environment?” (Connected Learning, 2014). Of course, instituting inquiry thinking into lessons ideally will help students do better on assessments, and using technology engages students because it’s modern and relatable, but it’s difficult to balance all of the requirements of a teacher – especially when tests seem to be the only things that matter.

            I had one math teacher in high school who was the reason I wanted to be a teacher. To this day, I could not tell someone half of the material that she taught me in class, which is sad because I am now a math teacher, but I remember the fun projects that we did and the way that she made us each feel special and cared for. The life lessons are going to be what students remember, but we are so bogged down in the standards and the rubrics and the evaluations that we cannot focus on some of the more fun and engaging stuff. The way to get students to think more critically is to be more engaging. In twenty years, a student may not need to know how to calculate the cosine of an angle given its legs’ lengths, but they will need to think critically and to solve problems in other situations. Their jobs may not require them to determine the volume of a cylinder, but their daily lives may be improved by comparing prices of good at Walmart based on the volume of the container. Lehmann states, “What I think school tries to do is to help kids become the citizens we need, not so much the workforce we need… I think that’s a powerful difference that affects not only how, but what we teach” (Connected Learning, 2014). By pushing inquiry learning, independent thinking, and efficient (but not dependent) use of technology, we can successfully help develop the citizens that we need.

References

Connected Learning. (2014, June 26). Connected Learning TV - Chris Lehmann - 3/28/2013. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OinJ2ZMFqNg

Wiggins, G. (2014, January 15). Great teaching means letting go. TeachThought. Retrieved from http://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/great-teaching-means-letting-go/