One of the interesting thoughts that's followed me this year is our perception of junior students. Having not taught juniors for a long time, I am back into that environment but with renewed perspectives. In years past I was able to guide my learners through systems that promoted agency, like hacking the classroom. This year though, it's back to more teacher directed systems. Why? Why is there the assumption that juniors MUST be 'trained now' in order to be agentic later on? This bears little logic when examined closely. Agency cannot be developed by first disempowering learners and then try to grow it back again years later.
The Catch 22 became evident last week in class. After giving my students choice all year of where to sit to do their work, over half have asked me for a place with a name tag. "What!?" I silently screamed, gulped and said "Sure." They want the security of having a place to 'own.' It wasn't even about sitting next to their friends as they were quite happy for me to choose where they sat. This puzzled me completely until I realised that this was how they learned last year. That was their first experience of school: My teacher tells me what to do, what to learn and where to sit. Dang. I know myself that when faced with the unknown it's easy to revert back to a comfortable default setting.
This came as a shock to me. Last year I had developed a class culture where there was a serious partnership in learning with my year 4-5 students because they:
- Chose workshops to attend based on their learning needs.
- Voted with their feet when attending workshops (why waste their time- thank you Lesley Murrihy, Amesbury School).
- Run weekly class meetings.
- Chose next learning steps.
- Dictated the use of their physical environment.
The cognitive dissonance between encouraging and enabling authentic student voice while having to create accountability systems to track learning is a deep one. But how do I know that something is of value to my learners if I don't actively include them in the setting up of systems? Granted, they don't know what they don't know, but how can they help to construct what they don't know how to construct because they've just never been exposed to it.
This is where what I call "The Artful Teaching Moment" comes into play. That moment where the teacher becomes the conductor of the orchestra. Without the players, there is no music so they are the vital part, each with their own unique sound, while the conductor is responsible for bringing it all together into harmony. And Lean Design Thinking is the best batton I've seen so far.
Little gems have appeared over the week that has made me realise that it's time to bring back what I've learned about empowering student voice for learning and give it back to the little people. Because I sure don't want to create ropes around their sense of self as learners that will take work to undo later on. Or at least I'd like to give them a chance to not have only ONE default setting like they have now.
So here it goes. Walk the talk and hacking the classroom with 6-year-olds is coming.
Lean design thinking requires me to include my stakeholders and hear them out- perfect. What better way to do this than hack the classroom and redesign our learning environment for Term 3.
How am I feeling? Very excited AND...
via GIPHY
But what meaningful change doesn't give one the odd moment of panic, uh?
Readings:
Ziskovsky, B., & Ziskovsky, J. (2007). Doing more with less–Going Lean in education. A White Paper on Process Improvement in Education, Lean Education Enterprises Inc. Shoreview, Minnesota, 1-19.
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