Last weekend I found myself sorting through some saved papers, books, and magazines and I ran across a paper I had written for a History of Philosophy of Education course that I took as a requirement for my Master’s in Education. Sitting on the floor in our upstairs office I read through the paper and thought, “Wow, I still believe in everything that I wrote even though it was 1989 when I submitted that paper.” Of course, it helps that I wasn’t “young” when I wrote it but was 39 years of age with some classroom experience and my own sons were 10 and 12 years old and so I had had plenty of time to form and also confirm my own personal philosophy. In fact, the title of the paper was “Personal Philosophy Paper.”
Here’s how it started…
“I was a seed. My father thought of me as a lump of clay. The educational system that I work in was formed on the thought that the students are lumps of clay. I work within that system knowing that the students were seeds that have sprouted into a variety of plants. The seed analogy assumes that a unique individual is born into the world to be helped in life in order to grow, learn, and flourish as an individual. The clay analogy assumes that all people are born to be taught and molded into educated adults. I have recognized these two distinct views for a long time but the two analogies are perfect to describe them.”
I thought back to when I had written that paper. I was teaching mathematics at a junior high school in southern California. I remembered thinking that many of my colleagues approached teaching with the thought that a student in their class “didn’t learn” something until they had “taught them.” In contrast, I often wondered if my students had some understanding of a topic before I launched into any section of a unit. What had they already learned about fractions? What conceptual understanding did they have? What misconceptions did they have? What should be the best starting point?
Twenty-two years later … I often find myself working with teachers in their classrooms. Sometimes they don’t start a unit by finding out what their students already know. Is it because they believe that students are “lumps of clay” or is it because they’ve just not developed ideas of how to nurture the seeds of student thinking?
That last sentence is beautiful to me: “Is it because they believe that students are “lumps of clay” or is it because they’ve just not developed ideas of how to nurture the seeds of student thinking?” Not only is it poetically worded, but it helped me realize that I don’t always do a good enough job of seeing teachers as “seeds”. What ideas do teachers already have about students? How can I nurture an individual teacher, rather than thinking of molding them?
We can nurture an individual teacher by listening to them. I love it when our professional development work in any situation starts out with observations. We are provided time to value where the different individuals are in their journeys and think of what feedback/facilitation might help them the most.
I wonder if an adult’s learning environment should be any different that a child’s learning environment.
Thank you and all teachers for the work you do.
This is something I battle with at my middle school in the San Francisco Bay Area. I strive to nurture students’ learning by tapping into previous knowledge and their innate understanding of numbers, but sometimes find myself just working to teach the nuts and bolts of a process. I feel that overall, I view students as seeds, but I don’t effectively nurture them and sometimes just dump fertilizer and some water and move on without making sure I’ve gotten it to the roots. I feel that most teachers (I may be wrong here) see students as seeds, but once you’ve come to this realization, how do you plan and set up processes to allow students to grow into their best form? I have colleagues who don’t bother to pre-assess because they “know” that the students don’t know anything about the topic and the teachers feel the stress of getting through all of the curriculum before testing when we know that just getting through it doesn’t mean students actualy learned the material. Thank you for the thoughtful post.
Derek, I think you’ve mentioned an important factor of a teacher’s reality –> STRESS.
Just to set the context of my comments here — I’ve been out of a regular classroom setting for a little over 10 years having left full-time teaching on June 26, 2000. (Yes, I remember the exact date because my last year of teaching was full of stress!) As part of my Math Forum job I have times when I’m in classrooms as much as twice a week and then other times when I might be in a classroom once a month. And, I talk with classroom teachers with whom I’m working and because it’s over time I have been able to listen to their frustrations and/or have watched them deal with stress that is being imposed consciously or unconsciously from a system and/or individuals in a system.
In one conversation I was having recently I remember saying that in my ideal world, there should be a reverse of the stress that inevitably trickles down to the end of the chain — the students.
My mind is wandering back to when I was a California classroom teacher and the State had demands (Algebra for All!). Those demands were communicated to the district administrators who, in turn, communicated to the school administrators who, in turn, communicated to the teachers who, in turn, communicated to the students. Sometimes the panic and stress increased exponentially or so it seemed. I remember trying very, very hard to let some of the panic and stress diffuse when it got to me. I just did not want to pass it on to my students because I knew it was not positive energy. Doing that is not a simple task.
I wonder what stresses your colleagues are under. Are they being asked to implement a math program they aren’t yet familiar with enough to feel comfortable? Are they being asked to use a learning strategy that has been adopted as a school-wide program that adds another level of details they’ve not quite embraced? Is there a “test-prep” program that has been implemented without consideration of how it might mesh with the math curriculum in use? Or … something else?
Well pre-assessing students’ knowledge at start of a unit (lesson) is one thing, and actually doing something with it is another thing. Often teachers pre-assess students knowledge for the sake of doing it and will anyway plunge into their teaching the way they had planned it. In short what comes after pre-assessment is vague to many. Do you have multiple starting point, etc.?
Shahram, it’s great to hear from you!
At the Math Forum we’ve been working with teachers to encourage them to “listen” to their students. One way to describe it is having students involved in “accountable math talk.”
I’ve been working with a 6th grade teacher since October. I started by observing her classes and during our initial debriefings we agreed that her students weren’t talking enough. They weren’t engaged and one thing she wanted me to model is how to get students talking.
I used our Noticing/Wondering activity (Did we do that in the PoW course you took with me online?) I actually used that activity with prompts from their math book. I would show the students a visual and ask them “What do you notice?” My goal was to hear their thinking. On a few more visits I did this off and on and then she tried it. We both knew that there was a difference between when I did the activity with her students and when she did it. It wasn’t just that I was a “guest” — we finally realized that I wasn’t listening FOR something but instead I was listening TO the students.
As we talked she realized that she was finding herself listening for certain thinking and when she heard it, she moved on. She wasn’t letting the students’ thinking lead where the conversation might take them but, instead, was sticking to an agenda.
As she became more comfortable with questioning techniques that brought out student thinking because she was starting to listen to her students, she spent one entire class period doing just that. It was an important turning point for her. At the end of the day we had time to debrief and she commented on how tired she was! I said that I wasn’t surprised and I used that to have her think about what she had done and what the next step might be.
We agreed that she needed that full day of trying out the questioning techniques just to really get a sense of how it all works. We also agreed that more students needed more time to talk. How do you achieve that? Have them talk to each other! At first she wondered how that might work. She wouldn’t be able to hear them each or guide them each. Hmmmm….maybe that’s an important point. Does a teacher have to be in control of what each student says at each point in their learning? Should the student ideally be the in control of their own learning?
PS. You might find this article interesting:
http://mathforum.org/articles/communicator2010.html
I might have to blog on this myself, but here’s a statement I heard in the lunch room at a school recently. “I do teach. Very well, thank you very much. What they choose to retain is up to them.” I don’t think that’s either philosophy, exactly, but the teacher is clearly missing some important ideas about how children learn.
Do they need to time to talk or do they need time to be ‘listened to?’ Sometimes we confuse these. Also it seems possible that being listened to by a teacher is different from being listened to by a peer or the class, and there is, perhaps, the need to have time to listen. Finally, there is – as has been pointed out – the how of such listening. This seems to speak to the issue of control.
Saying some like a student should be in control of their learning raises a lot of issues. It seems that teaching does not insure learning and that, in fact, we often learn without a particular person doing teaching. In fact, I can refuse to learn (nice piece by Herbert Kohl on this). Gary Fenstermacher tried to tease apart teaching and learning and came up with teaching and studenting. Teaching then becomes something a teacher does (I am really abbreviating his argument) and studenting – which includes learning – becomes something students do. We, as teachers, impinge substantially on studenting and hence on the choices students make. However, it seems odd to hold a position that students don’t make choices as regards the significance of what they ‘retain.’ Perhaps, in a way, education is about providing practice space within which our students can construct, for themselves, ‘life enhancing’ choices.
Wow, well said…
I’ve postponed replying to this blog, because I’ve so much to say….
I think you summed up alot of my thoughts nicely. Teaching as Suzanne pointed out, just may be providing an environment students feel safe and encouraged to try, where being wrong isn’t an issue, but an oppurtunity…. One of my favorite quotes is that “mistakes are the portals of discovery” I think we should encourage the skill of thinking, not the skill to regurgitate correct responses.
[...] early April I posted thoughts about thinking of students as lumps of clay versus sprouting seeds. I started thinking of that again but this time in conjunction with the CCSS Standards for [...]
Mostly I agree with what you are saying in addition your logic is so on point that a fifth grader would be able to understand it.