classroom management BY LAURA THOMAS, MEd.
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Student-driven classrooms: Who does the hard work of learning? “The learner does the learning.” When I heard Charlotte Danielson say those words, I was struck by what my students would call a BFO – a “blinding flash of the obvious.” Learning is hard work if the learning is powerful and authentic.Teaching is hard too, but it shouldn’t be harder than learning. So why are the classrooms I visit filled with students who have lots and lots of energy to create mayhem and with teachers who seem harried and exhausted as they run from place to place trying to provide all the information and answer all the questions? If the learner does the learning, why are the teachers doing the hardest work in the classroom? The exceptions, however, are the classrooms I visit when I’m coaching student-driven classrooms run by teachers working to implement the Critical Skills Classroom model, either via Antioch University New England’s graduate program or their district’s professional development efforts. As teachers gain proficiency with Critical Skills and other student-driven models, we find that the balance shifts in their classrooms; students are working harder and teachers are working differently — as guides, facilitators, observers and assessors. In these classrooms we see teachers who are energized and students who leave the room exhausted but exhilarated by their efforts — the hallmark of studentcentered instruction. The trip across the instructional river from traditional teaching to studentcentered learning is a not a quick one and it can be intimidating for some. We like to provide a series of four “lily pads”
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to provide (temporary) landing spots as our teachers make the journey from one bank to the other. Lily pads being what they are, however, they don’t provide the stability required for a long stay — keep moving forward at a steady pace or you’ll end up in deep water!
1. Within a Community Anything is Possible — Without One, Nothing Is Start with the Collaborative Learning Community (CLC) — it’s the secret to instructional success. Building a CLC isn’t something we do to students; it’s something we do with them. Begin by providing opportunities for everyone to gain new knowledge about one another (including you!), focusing on names, basic information, preferred working and learning styles, skills and talents. Build trust by creating opportunities for students to solve problems together — real problems connected to both the classroom community and content-based problems. Create things together — systems, rituals and traditions as well as products demonstrating content knowledge gained — as a way of creating and maintaining classroom culture. Work hard together, because nothing builds community like meaningful work, but also find time to play! Enjoy the unique qualities that your students bring to your classroom and you will reap a more powerful instructional harvest.
2. Clarity, Clarity, Clarity When students don’t know what we expect, they either give up or they guess — and odds are they’ll guess wrong.
Gain clarity about both the content you want students to learn and the process skills you want them to demonstrate while they’re working. In the Critical Skills Classroom, we talk about creating Quality Criteria for and with our students. Start with the basics of classroom operations — Quality Audience, Quality Worker, Quality Conversation — and spend time breaking those down into a simple T-Chart. What does it look and sound like when we have a Quality Audience? A Quality Conversation? What should the teacher see when students are being Quality Workers or creating Quality Work? (You can break that down into more discrete skills later on. What does it look like when students are communicating effectively? Collaborating? Being organized?) Use Quinn’s Six Questions (Juli Quinn, PhD, 1994) to gain clarity about content. I’m amazed at how frequently teachers will know what they are covering — e.g., punctuation, the American Revolution, mitosis and meiosis, etc. — but they can’t articulate to me what students will show to demonstrate they understand the content.This is particularly true when students are engaged in the higher-level thinking required by the Common Core. For example, a teacher may tell me that her students are “doing” Romeo and Juliet and that they’ll be required to take a test on the plot and present a scene from the play at the end of the unit, but the questions,“What are students supposed to be showing they know?” and “How will you know if they know it?” seem to flummox them. Ask yourself the following questions: