For many years and way before it became en vogue again, I've been an advocate for a student centered approach to teaching and learning. When I started in education leadership, we were in the height of the accountability and NCLB era, and I saw so much inequity in the way some schools and/or students were given opportunities to do creative and engaging projects, field trips, enrichments like art and music, etc. While other schools were forced to use the "drill and kill" method to teach to the test based on the school's performance index. School leaders were afraid to try innovative approaches because so much emphasis was placed on "turning around" a low performing school by improving test scores. I began to see this as a civil rights issue and that's when I joined with a small group of folks in NVUSD (including the superintendent at the time) to try to bring the federal Magnet school program to our district.
I had been inspired by the mission of the International Baccalaureate Organization which was for students to develop knowledge and skills for the purpose of affecting change in the world. When I was given the opportunity to try to "turn around" a low performing Title 1 school, I was determined to do it with a magnet program that focused on students becoming active learners that owned their learning and saw themselves as capable. When I started at the new school, what I saw was students who were for the most part passive and quiet, with the teachers doing almost all the talking. I rarely heard students share their thinking and teachers were over- scaffolding even with kids who were clearly ready to do the work themselves. Since then, our school has been on a journey to create conditions for students to become capable and independent learners and to know themselves and what they need to be successful.
There have been many challenges to this process including language development, social-emotional needs of students, and primarily a teaching staff that had been trained within that same more traditional model. Over a number of years, our school has made significant progress in inquiry-based instruction, deeper thinking routines, collaborative work, questioning strategies, social-emotional learning, etc. which have all contributed to greater independence in our students. However, we still find that students struggle to apply their learning and that teachers still default at times to directing rather than facilitating. Students are still not doing as much for themselves as we would like to see.
Then, with the onset of the pandemic shutdown, we began to see students becoming more dependent on parents and caregivers to do basic tasks that at school they would have easily done with limited support. When some students were finally able to return in person in late October, we noticed immediately that students had lost some of their stamina to work independently and were reluctant to take risks. Students that would have easily written independently for 30 minutes at a sitting last year, were now giving up after 5-10 minutes. They were looking for more direction than ever and some students were even putting off tasks until they could do them at home with a parent's assistance. And students without the side-by-side support at home have really struggled and the gap for underserved students is widening.
All this has led to an increased urgency in our goal to increase student agency and to help our students develop self-efficacy. My driving question is about what specific moves we can make as teachers that will promote student agency and reignite our students desire to use their voice and take action based on their learning. We are starting to explore how we can think differently about how we can elicit student voice in innovative ways virtually. We are looking at ways to use technology to encourage collaboration where students can share their unique perspectives that mimics face to face collaborative groups. We are looking for new ways for students to represent themselves and their work in a virtual setting. As we make agreements as a school, I will be measuring how our students respond to our more focused work toward agency.
I had been inspired by the mission of the International Baccalaureate Organization which was for students to develop knowledge and skills for the purpose of affecting change in the world. When I was given the opportunity to try to "turn around" a low performing Title 1 school, I was determined to do it with a magnet program that focused on students becoming active learners that owned their learning and saw themselves as capable. When I started at the new school, what I saw was students who were for the most part passive and quiet, with the teachers doing almost all the talking. I rarely heard students share their thinking and teachers were over- scaffolding even with kids who were clearly ready to do the work themselves. Since then, our school has been on a journey to create conditions for students to become capable and independent learners and to know themselves and what they need to be successful.
There have been many challenges to this process including language development, social-emotional needs of students, and primarily a teaching staff that had been trained within that same more traditional model. Over a number of years, our school has made significant progress in inquiry-based instruction, deeper thinking routines, collaborative work, questioning strategies, social-emotional learning, etc. which have all contributed to greater independence in our students. However, we still find that students struggle to apply their learning and that teachers still default at times to directing rather than facilitating. Students are still not doing as much for themselves as we would like to see.
Then, with the onset of the pandemic shutdown, we began to see students becoming more dependent on parents and caregivers to do basic tasks that at school they would have easily done with limited support. When some students were finally able to return in person in late October, we noticed immediately that students had lost some of their stamina to work independently and were reluctant to take risks. Students that would have easily written independently for 30 minutes at a sitting last year, were now giving up after 5-10 minutes. They were looking for more direction than ever and some students were even putting off tasks until they could do them at home with a parent's assistance. And students without the side-by-side support at home have really struggled and the gap for underserved students is widening.
All this has led to an increased urgency in our goal to increase student agency and to help our students develop self-efficacy. My driving question is about what specific moves we can make as teachers that will promote student agency and reignite our students desire to use their voice and take action based on their learning. We are starting to explore how we can think differently about how we can elicit student voice in innovative ways virtually. We are looking at ways to use technology to encourage collaboration where students can share their unique perspectives that mimics face to face collaborative groups. We are looking for new ways for students to represent themselves and their work in a virtual setting. As we make agreements as a school, I will be measuring how our students respond to our more focused work toward agency.