RHB20230812 - This is Reddam¶
Friday the 4th of August¶
I walk down the school's empty hallways thirty minutes before school starts and hear the melodic echoes of mallets on wood. I move towards the sound to investigate its source and discover a full marimba band practicing for their regional tournament. No teacher in sight. I make a pointed joke at them for being at school so early but I am mostly ignored. They are serious.
I later enter the auditorium and we teachers are all sitting in the back rows talking amongst ourselves. None of us concerned about the assembly proceedings about to follow. Fourteen year olds lead two hundred students and teachers in a woman's month educational procession: "You strike a woman you strike a rock". Poetry. Singing. Dancing. History. A full ceremony. The only teacher involved is Mr Smee handing out his weekly prize for students who have been true to themselves that week, a small part in the whole procession.
I make my way onto the sports field two hours before the close of school. Students ushering other students into a tightly packed square. We are two hundred but sound like four hundred, wildly supporting fellow teammates ceaselessly from the start of the match to the end. Most of them losing their voices. There is an energy.
This is Reddam.
Buzz-words and empty promises¶
Student-led and student-centred education has always been a buzzword in studies, articles and school advertising. I have always put it amongst other buzzwords like innovation, small-classes, collaboration, iPad based classes and Cambridge. Things that get bums on seats but do nothing to change how learning actually happens in the classroom.
At Reddam I have only just begun to develop an understanding of what student-led education even is... I have loved seeing us give power to the students to lead, create, initiate, investigate and run with things on their own. From student leadership in grade twelve initiatives, to the grade eight's running the assembly; students are given endless opportunities to generate real value with their own voice and present it in front of others.
We are exceptionally good at giving students opportunities to lead outside of the classroom, but we have a lot of room to grow in the classroom, where the learning should happen. I have been investigating a pedagogical approach from a book called "Building Thinking classrooms in Mathematics" and my grade ten class has been the guinea-pig. The approach has four phases in which it aims to implement fourteen practices (find a copy attached). I am only considering the first phase at the moment which includes the following practices: give thinking tasks, form visibly random groups and use non-permanent vertical surfaces.
For ten years my lessons have been me talking for forty minutes and doing examples on the board and asking students questions, then giving students twenty minutes to do classwork activities. This is passive. It is easy for students to wander inside their minds. I see it all the time. The "Building Thinking Classrooms" approach gets them working on a problem together right from the start of the lesson. The randomness gets them working with different personalities in class, sometimes they have to listen, sometimes they have to lead. The non-permanent vertical surfaces (we are blessed with large whiteboard spaces) make it so that they have to stand, an engaged position already, and visibly interact with their work and the work of others around them.
This approach has moved some students from idly surviving the lesson and maybe getting ten to fifteen minutes of thinking time to actively having to engage for close to forty or fifty minutes. Watch this space! I am getting excited about this.
We often forget that students are their own people, on a journey through life just as we teachers are. They are not empty buckets to be filled. We think that if we have spoken the curriculum in class, it can be considered taught. I want to move away from this and towards a teaching pedagogy that empowers students to learn and guide themselves through the curriculum. They won't get it perfect, their notes will be incomplete, they will learn some of the wrong things, but it will be theirs. And I would argue that it would be at-least as good as what we are doing now.
What part of your lessons are passive? What part of your lessons are active? Can students gain the same knowledge you are going to teach through an investigative problem? Does this only work in technical subjects like maths, accounting, physics, IT where you have "problems" to solve?
What does student-centred education mean to you?
Love, Cliff