Battling 'Just Tell Me What to Do'.

I was caught completely off guard this week during pre-enrollment by a student comment: "Why can't we just have Junior English? Just tell me what to take. I'm not going to like it anyway." 

The student hit me, hard. At first, I didn't understand how he could say such a thing, and my initial reaction was frustration. We had made a fairly major shift within the ELA department, eliminating on-level Junior and Senior English from the curriculum and replacing them with high interest and high relevance semester class offerings.  We had spent a great deal of time crafting the change, drawing on ideas from the past and dreaming big for the future, focusing and refocusing our purpose, and drawing on student input to help develop the curriculum. It wa a team effort, and the administration and BOE had been extremely supportive, asking the important questions and expressive the appropriate concerns which revolved around one principle: What is best for our kids? We had polled students about what courses they felt they would gain the most from, and we had drawn from research students had done regarding what should be done to improve education. Our semester courses now include Passion Pursuits, a research and writing class that allows students to research a passion they hold and then use that research to do something bigger. That had been a part of our Senior English curriculum for some time, and we did not want to lose it; in fact we want to expand it. That semester is required during the junior or senior year. We now offer War Literature, Pop Culture Literature, Media Criticism and Review, Gothic Lit and Fantasy Fiction, Creative Writing, Heroes and Mythology, and Technical Writing and Lifelong Reading. Dual credit classes are now a part of the course offerings. Our seniors are a little upset with us because they wish we had made the change earlier. Graduates have emailed or tweeted us about how much they wish they could have been a part of this change. 

And here is a student complaining that he wishes he didn't have to choose what was interesting to him and could just be told what to do. 

I lamented the comment and my frustration in the hallway. Hallway collaboration is a key part of my personal development as a teacher. Our hallway is populated with amazing people with incredible minds, and I try to tap into that wealth as much as possible. Later, one of those teachers Voxed me about the conversation we had. We do that a lot, and our collective minds usually lead to something positive.

Many of our kids, much like many of our teachers, have been trained to do what they are told. Student voice and student choice require them to take ownership of their learning. It is not that they do not care or do not want to be active in their learning; some of them just do not know how to do that because they have never been given that power.  We encourage our gifted students to "enrich their learning", but the majority of our students have been driven to, basically, just get as many answers right as possible. Pass the test and do what will earn the points to get a passing grade. That is what they have learned to do. And the truly bothers me. Here is an opportunity for  each student to decide how he or she wants to improve as a writer, a reader as a learner, to select what is most interesting and relevant to him. And he was complaining. 

After thinking about it and discussing it, I came to realize that he was not really complaining about the choices and options: he was complaining about how he had been taught to approach his education for 11 years. School was something that had been done to him.  Now the rules were changing, and it was making him uncomfortable. As we have tried more and more to involve our students in owning their learning in our individual classrooms through PBL, inquiry, and more, we have seen it before. When we have tried to guide students to initiate, extend, enrich, and demonstrate their learning, some students immediately want to be told what to do. The freedom and uncertainty can be scary. "How much do I have to do to pass/get an A?" is a common query, especially from honors students. The grade has always been the goal, the prize, and we have ingrained that into their thinking. It has been our fault, and it is our responsibility to shift the thinking back to learning, back to thinking. We need to recapture the excitement we see in our elementary kids. Some students are hungry for that, and they are feasting in our classrooms and in our building. As they do, they ask less and less often about grades, and they take more and more risks in their learning. Others are less comfortable, not because they are being obstinate or do not want to learn, but because they honestly understand their learning, their education, in such a way that makes owning their learning somehow wrong, or at least unexpected. As with every lesson, we have to demonstrate how this is relevant, how it will benefit not just all of our students, but each student as an individual. 

In other words, I need to be a teacher. I need to facilitate each kids' learning, even if it is learning about owning his own learning. If I can do that, then we all learn more. And we all win.