In my practice of teaching, I find myself on a weekly basis coming back to some very basic, 30,000 foot questions. Let me list a few of them for you, in no particular order.
- Can the experience in my classroom be understood or appreciated from any vantage point of the participant? (Culture, gender, race, socioeconomic status, ect.)
- Will the student understand what we are doing and why I believe it is relevant (and worthy of our time)?
- Will the skills we are practicing transfer to other areas of life for the student, now and especially in the future?
- Am I unintentionally unloading some of my own beliefs, baggage, or biases on to my students?
- Am I motivated by any forces outside my classroom? Politics or standardized tests or impressing someone in a position of power?
- Which students am I missing relationally? And why?
This is the shortened list. There is easily a top 50 if we had the time to list the things that might wake a teacher up out of a deep sleep at night. Seeing that we wear so many vocational hats at once, one would understand why our anxiety levels can easily spike. We are the facilitator of a learning process, but we are also a myriad of other things: curriculum designers, writers, counselors, project managers, and more often than you’d think, surrogate parents. All of which make the profession so fantastically interesting, exhausting, and rewarding.
Education has been in a slow state of reform as long as I’ve been teaching. The deeper learning movement has been concerned with the obvious disparities between what students are actually doing and learning in the classroom compared to what is happening in the modern marketplace. The dress rehearsal had become far too foreign to the real play. The idea has been, at least for the last 20 years, that we must reform our practices to better equip our future thinkers and doers to compete on the global stage. The world seemed to transition from the industrial to the technological so quickly, and education systems somehow didn’t get the memo. Capitalism has outpaced the bureaucratic system of schools, that have been lurching slowly forward, mired down with policy makers and special interest-types. Whomever you might blame for the lethargy, even the layperson or outside visitor to a classroom could observe that things looked like a time capsule from thirty or even forty years ago. Add to this the bemoaning of the modern job market that cries fowl when their newest hires do not seem to have the soft skills (or human competencies) necessary to succeed. (Cassner-Lotto and Barrington).
I was lucky to get a dose of the traditional, comprehensive high school for a few years before coming to a school that had made change and transformation their core mission. I will never forget one of the statements from a higher-up in the district that spoke to me that first year in my new environment. He looked around to see who might be in ear shot of us, leaned in a little, and said, “Do me a favor. Don’t even look at the standardized tests slated for this school year.” I was new to the game, so his remarks did not land with much impact on me then. But today I understand a little more of what he meant. When I think back to that interaction though, I am mostly struck by the irony of what was happening. This seasoned educator had only experienced the classroom of the industrial revolution, and here he was talking to a new recruit who also had the exact same scenery. And he was suggesting that we change the playbook? But with what? We had never seen anything else. Jal Mehta, from Harvard’s School of Education, pointed out that irony recently: “Most of these [teachers and leaders] have never experienced the kind of schooling that we are trying to generate, and, in fact, have considerable experience in the traditional system that we are seeking to hospice” (Mehta).
A recent writing exercise in my class highlighted for me the wildly different mindsets in a room of 25 kids. The word I drilled down on by the end of the day was conscientiousness. Some students walked through my door that day with loads of it. Conscientiousness to spare actually. And others, well, they had really no intention of producing anything in class that day that they would be proud of. As the writing experience unfolded, I watched some students check and re-check their work. I watched others hide their phone in their lap and scroll through social media or daydream. Some would fact-check their writing and look for ways to improve the flow of their words. Others drew little cartoons or memes on their desk.
This scene probably reminds every adult of their own high school experience. We all knew those peers that seemed destined to outperform most of the class; today, the kids call them try-hards, which tickled me. And then there were the kids that would wander into class prepared to do little more than catch a short nap before lunch. Indeed, most of the barriers to learning found in the modern classroom are not really new at all. Kids will be kids, as they say. But when I push myself to re-think what school could possibly look like compared to my own high school experience, I have to wrestle with an uncomfortable question: “Can I actually teach a kid to be conscientious?”
There likely isn’t a modern school system today that doesn’t profess on paper at least that soft skills matter. The research is too clear on the matter. Further, one would be hard pressed to find a school that hasn’t at least in part adopted skills like creative and critical thinking or collaboration into their portrait of a graduate. But beyond defining these skills, do teachers have the evidence-based tools in their toolbox to actively teach these skills?
In the case of my writing exercise this week, I found myself going back to a very simple and fundamental approach in pedagogy. We call it the “I do, we do, you do” model. Just as the title hints, the gradual release approach is a fundamental strategy that works in every stage of human development. I use it with high schoolers in quoting a passage in MLA format, and I use it to teach my six year old how to tie her shoes. One day a nurse might use it to teach me how to use a walker.
I thought about the student who lacks the will or imagination or discipline to actually care about the quality of their work and it hit me: these students may not have had an experience yet where they created something they were proud of. Either because the adults in their life failed to praise or acknowledge them, or they frankly haven’t created something praiseworthy. Both are possible.
What about this approach. Create an opportunity for the student to launch from a familiar starting point, with the purpose of creating an artifact that will have meaning and purpose; and the thing – the paper or artwork or podcast or whatever it is – will be seen by others. Walk through the journey with the student, especially in the darkest hour just before dawn, when the familiar feeling of giving up sets in. And finally, celebrate with the student when the journey is done. Stand back to revel in the final product with the student. Acknowledge what a beautiful struggle it has been. And communicate the value not only in the finished product, but in the process.
The above scenario is not a pedagogical breakthrough. There is nothing in it that is revolutionary, and yet all too often there are students who do not get this experience first hand. I would argue that the reason is not poorly equipped teachers (although I’m sure that is sometimes the case), but a poor system that does not consistently allow for such a scenario. Too many systemic or organizational barriers often prohibit deeper learning like this. Mehta goes on to point out in his recent paper that “Deeper learning leaders recognize that it is the least engagedstudents who most need a new approach” (Mehta, emphasis added).
As if schools do not have enough of a challenge in front of them, it is imperative that the leaders of our systems go beyond just defining the soft skills and promoting them on a badge or new marketing rollout. We must engage in the messy work of teaching these skills in real ways. And our leadership must acknowledge that systemic change will be necessary if we are to get serious about moving the needle toward dispositions that will actually matter in today’s job market.
- J. Casner-Lotto and L. Barrington, “Are They Really Ready to Work? Employers’ Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century U.S. Workforce,” ERIC, 2006; C. Jerald, “Defining a 21st Century Education,” The Center for Public Education, July 2009. ↩︎
- Mehta, J. (2024), “Commentary: Leading for deeper learning: why a human vision of schooling demands a human vision of leadership”, Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 62 No. 1, pp. 173-177. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2024-276