Worth a Listen, Look or Read #21 — I Know You Can Do It
Jeff Ikler here for Kirsten Richert with our weekly “Getting Unstuck” mini feature: Here in about five minutes, we extend the theme behind this week’s podcast with some related content that we feel is definitely “Worth a Listen, Look or Read.”
“You see this creature with her curbstone English, the English that will keep her in the gutter till the end of her days? Well sir, in six months, I could pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball.”
The idea
This week I talked with Dr. Lindsay Lyons, an educational coach who helps teachers design curricula that puts student voice front and center in classroom learning and build capacity for shared classroom leadership. https://bit.ly/2X5eGph
This idea of giving voice to students to choose content and activities that are of interest to them with appropriate support from their teachers has long intrigued me. I experimented with this idea a number of times when I was teaching U.S. History back in, well, we don’t need to go there. I will say this: many kids responded positively, but not all initially.
So, I asked Lyndsay how the students and educators she works with react to voice and choice.
“Some students are excited, some family members are excited, some teachers, and administrators excited.
And then there's also folks who are, including students, really hesitant. I could see the teachers being hesitant to give up control. I've literally had many students tell me, ‘Mss, just tell me what to do. That's what you're supposed to do. You're the teacher. That's how school is done.’
And so that's really shocking to me. And I think it speaks to the way they've been educated up until I get them in high school. And so they've had this one way of doing things for so long that it's kind of like ‘I don't even know where to go when I'm given the opportunity to tell my teacher what I want to learn about or how I want to demonstrate my learning.’
And so I find that with teachers and administrators as well, there's kind of a mix, there's excitement, but there's also the practical: ‘How do I do this without losing control of my class? How do I do this and still meet the standards that I need to meet.’”
These practical concerns, I think, get to an underlying belief that many educators still hold, and that is we can’t really expect kids to step boldly enough into self-directed learning that deliver expected classroom outcomes.
Taking the idea deeper
Let’s take this idea of expectations deeper. Thinking about student voice and choice, and desired outcomes, I was reminded of the Pygmalion effect, or the Rosenthal effect, named after the social psychologist who proposed it in 1963. Basically, Rosenthal’s experiment led him to conclude that people will perform better when higher expectations are put on them. Applied to education — the original experiment was actually done with students — if teachers approach all students as “academic bloomers,” providing them with more personal interactions, highly extensive feedback, more approval, more supportive gestures — and more voice and choice? — they’re likely to achieve improved outcomes. I would add that in trying this approach, teachers need to be very explicit with students about desired outcomes.
Interestingly, the converse also appears to be true. if teachers consciously or unconsciously don’t regularly approach students who they think are less able, they’re likely to reinforce a student’s lower expectation and outcomes. As a glaring example of how holding minimal expectations for certain students can work, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio just announced a phasing out of the city’s long-standing “gifted and talented” program, which had helped lead the city to be one most segregated in the nation.
A fun aside
Check out this clip from the movie My Fair Lady, which came to theaters in 1964. The slug line for the film is “Snobbish phonetics Professor Henry Higgins agrees to a wager that he can make flower girl Eliza Doolittle presentable in high society.” Interestingly, the film was based on a Broadway play that ran starting in 1956. And that Broadway play was based on the 1913 (!) play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw – both running long before Rosenthal’s experiment. The main theme of that play is that character is what makes us who we are, not where we’re born.
Put the idea to work
Let’s put the idea to work. What are some simple ways to ease students into voice and choice?
1. Rubrics - Before engaging students in any type of content exploration or activity of their choosing, make sure that everyone is clear on what outcomes you expect from the lesson or unit of study. Co-constructing or walking students through a rubric is a great way to get everyone on the same page.
2. Community application - Depending on the subject area, see if there is a way for students to apply their learning in the community. Is there local problem they can identify that needs attention?
3. Detective work - This idea comes courtesy of the historian David McCullough who shared it with me one night over cocktails at the Wayside in Sudbury, Mass. Assemble photographs or illustrations that reflect some aspect of a particular subject area. The subject of the photos should not be identified, but there must be sufficient context clues that can point students toward an investigation. Divide the class into teams of three and let them see what they can come up with.
What’s the name of the plane? Where is it in this photo? Who are the men in front of it? Why are they there? What did the plane story’s reveal about World War II aviation and the crews that flew the planes?
I decided to try McCullough’s idea. I had an unidentified photo of a World War II bomber sitting on a tarmac with a row of uniformed men standing in front of it. The photo had been given to me because of my interest in World War II aviation. Through phone calls and online research, I identified the name of the plane, where it was photographed, and why it was there.
But my investigation also revealed a number of doors that I could try to open and investigate. And so I did.
Who were the men in front of the plane? And why were they there? What were their war stories; their life stories?
What was the plane’s backstory story? What had it experienced during the war? Why was it important enough to take it out of the war against Germany? What eventually happened to it?
It was a wonderful journey that took me over the tumultuous skies of Germany, Italy and Rumania during the war, and to a small house in a Texas town set amid expansive cattle ranches. And of course, there was the ticking clock in the living room.