Thursday, November 17, 2016

Is Implementing New Strategies with Students Like Entering the Shark Tank?

Will Brydon - @WillBrydon
Academy for Global Studies
Oshkosh Area School District

Entering the Shark Tank

Sometimes, starting a new school year feels like entering The Shark Tank to me, where instead of pitching my product ideas to a panel of business megastars (the sharks), I am pitching my educational philosophy to students (perhaps not as terrifying as sharks but perfectly capable of biting back!). It can be nerve wracking when you start out, but, after my work over the summer, I could not wait to get going in my class and introduce my students to the concept of Personalized Learning. Most of my summer had been spent thinking about my strategies to employ this teaching method, designing instructional units, and constructing materials to use throughout the year. I was more than ready to move out of the realm of the hypothetical and into actual implementation! Cut to the second week of school, where I have already espoused my philosophy on education to the students and introduced them, at least initially, to Personalized Learning. The next step was to call on an authority with much more credibility than myself to continue to build the case for this learning style. Naturally, I turned to the well-known educational thinker Sir Ken Robinson and his TEDtalk “Do schools kill creativity?” My students watched politely as I played the video, reciting the words I had heard him say about 20 times before in previous viewings, but it wasn’t eliciting the reaction I was expecting in my students. That moment was when I realized Personalized Learning with my students would not be a top-down initiative forced on them from me - so what next?

Going Back to the Drawing Board

Looking back on that experience now, the discouragement and disappointment I felt should have been expected. Here I was standing on my soap box speaking about the benefits of Personalized Learning and its background, which must have sounded like the same white noise they are always accustomed to hearing in school. Another mandate, another “start of the year” activity, another cog in the machine that is school / education. I most certainly was not going for that effect, but I am sure at least some my students had that perception. So I thought about what I wanted to accomplish over the course of the year: intrinsic motivation, ownership of learning, excitement in the classroom, a hunger for knowledge, and students designing their own units to hit my target standards, among others. This reflection led me to the conclusion that I couldn’t sell my students (the sharks) on Personalized Learning; rather, they needed to demand it.

"I thought about what I wanted to accomplish over the course of the year: intrinsic motivation, ownership of learning, excitement in the classroom, a hunger for knowledge, and students designing their own units to hit my target standards, among others. This reflection led me to the conclusion that I couldn’t sell my students (the sharks) on Personalized Learning; rather, they needed to demand it."

A New Pitch

The following week, I returned to the tank of my classroom with a new approach in mind. We viewed a few of the Sir Ken Robinson clips again, but this viewing came with a discussion that pushed the students towards self-reflection. I posed the question: “do you feel like school is killing your creativity?” and got a variety of responses, mostly focused on the aspects of school they did not like. So I probed deeper and countered with, “ok, so if school has so many negatives, what motivates you to do well?” At this point, the conversation really got going, and my students provided a myriad of responses ranging from familial pressure to competition with peers to getting As to going to a top university. What broke my heart, though, was that no student mentioned they were motivated in school because they love to learn, so that is what I told them.

Flip the Script

Our conversations continued in small groups where eventually many students reached the conclusion that their motivation hinged on their interest and level of enjoyment, which makes sense, if you think about it. All humans are naturally drawn to their interest; this theory isn’t anything new, but I had to make my students see the connection between Personalized Learning and bringing their passions into the classroom before I could fully develop the strategy. In the midst of these conversations, our first content unit was well underway as well, which focused on Spectacle and the essential question of “why does inequality exist among humans and with what consequences?” This unit was my first opportunity to allow the students to see how their interests could directly impact their learning in my class, so I let their discussions run the wide spectrum of responses that the unit’s essential question encompasses. It was interesting to see what kinds of inequality the students focused on and what consequences they found in both the novel and their contemporary society. Their interest drove me towards the design of their first unit assessment - a major inversion of the normal planning structure where assessment informs instruction.

Push the Prototype

Now that my sharks had swarmed to the chum of this unit’s materials, the time had come to move them through the first unit assessment. From a teaching standpoint, in past years, my goal was to have my students produce one coherent, analytical, argumentative paragraph, and this goal did not change from year to year. However, this time around, I changed the unit assessment (which can be seen here) to be open-ended enough for the students to bring their interests into their writing. I did not mandate how they chose to answer the question, I did not dictate what outside source they needed to include, and I did not force them to try to guess what I wanted to hear as the teacher in their analysis. The results were stunning.

Analyze the Feedback

I was floored by the wide variety of ways my students chose to frame their work, as evidenced by their topic sentences. Here are just a few examples:

“The many different types of inequality that exist today are due to ethnocentrism, which causes a harder lifestyle for the victims and creates a larger gap between everyone in the world.”

“Inequality exists because people feel insecure or nervous, and they feel that they have to put others down in order to feel better than themselves, which leads to the consequences that people feel left out.”

“Inequality exist among humans because people have different perspectives on what is right from wrong and when a mass amount of people agree on where people should be placed, stereotypes are formed, bringing society down by causing riots, increased crime rates, and more poverty.”

These samples were chosen at random from my students, but they highlight the wide variety of responses I received that were supported by sources as diverse as podcasts, magazine article, op-ed pieces, TEDtalks, etc. When I asked my students to reflect on how they felt during the process, their honesty was also an encouraging sign. Some recognized that the open-endedness made them uncomfortable, some admitted to being stuck without knowing where to start, and some said they liked the opportunity to pick what they wrote about. All in all, a vast majority said they liked the process overall and got more comfortable as the work time progressed, and I made sure to comment back that they are only just beginning this journey. I am sure this next unit will bring about new challenges and comments from the students, but as long as they continue to display that internal desire to learn in ways that suit them best, then Personalized Learning will continue to gain a foothold in my classroom. They may not have bought the whole pitch, but at least they’re listening and intrigued.

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