So often, as teachers, we are the rulers of our little worlds: the monarchs, the dictators. We have control of when students talk because we call on them, when they walk because they have to ask for permission, who they work with because we make the groups, and what they’re working on because we make all the assignments and ask all the questions. In a way, it’s like playing a live version of Sims.
When the teacher is the center of the class, he or she has a reasonably good idea of what will or can happen during the course of a given class period. Teachers have an idea of which students will cause disruptions, which students will step up and be leaders, which students will answer the questions, and which students will never raise their hands (maybe just because they’re too shy to speak in front of the entire class). Although as any teacher with more than a day of experience would know, kids can always throw a wrench into the works.
With CCSS, NGSS, and the C3 Framework changing the educational world, teachers are put in a position in which they are no longer the center of the class more than they ever have been before, and that’s a scary place to be. The CCSS, NGSS, and C3 often require teachers to put more responsibility into the students’ hands. Doing this means letting the kids go, and letting them go means letting control of the classroom go. Once we let go of control, we can’t be entirely sure of what will happen. We will no longer know all of those things we were once so sure of.
Not only do these initiatives throw our methods into flux, but they can even throw the content of the class into disarray. Now the teacher who spent years developing their craft and years developing their content knowledge is potentially left in a world in which they can feel as if they don’t “know” anything. That feeling can be a bit unfounded because any professional that’s lasted years in the business can handle the situation; however, that doesn’t mean that it’s not scary, and that doesn’t mean getting beyond that fear isn’t hard work.
A NEW WAY OF THINKING
In their new book, Think Like A Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner challenge their readers to think differently and think like a freak. By this they mean that one should think “from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations . . . with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism.”
They maintain that “the first step is to not be embarrassed by how much you don’t yet know.” Until one can say, “I don’t know” and “admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.”
The adoption and implementation of CCSS, NGSS, and the C3 Framework are going to require a new approach to the way we think about our students, content, classrooms, and practice. Furthermore, these initiatives are going to require us to admit that there are things that we aren’t comfortable with and things we don’t yet know. Once this happens we can get down to the business of figuring out how to work in this new world. If we don’t make these admissions, we will struggle with the challenges facing us in the 21st Century as the world continues to evolve around us. Furthermore, administration must think differently and realize that there will be a learning curve with every change and create an environment in which teachers feel comfortable to admit that they don’t know everything.
A NEW PARADIGM
Admitting that we don’t know everything, especially with an infusion of change, opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. Does tomorrow’s classroom even resemble today’s classroom?
Levitt and Dubner tell the story of Brian Mullaney and Operation Smile, a charity dedicated to helping children in underdeveloped countries by surgically repairing cleft lips and palates. The authors credit much of Operation Smile’s success to the fact that it “changed the frame of the relationship between the charity and the donor . . . Whenever you interact with another entity, whether it’s your best friend or some faceless bureaucracy, the interaction falls into one of a handful of frameworks . . . there’s the authority framework, in which someone gives instructions and someone else is expected to follow them - think of parents, teachers, police and military officers, and a certain kind of boss.”
Are we struggling with the implementation of CCSS, NGSS, and the C3 Framework because we are trying to fit these new initiatives into an old framework: the proverbial square peg in the round hole? Do we need to flip the paradigm of the teacher centered classroom on its head? If we shifted the framework of the student/teacher relationship from one that is teacher centered to one that makes the teacher more of a facilitator, the CCSS, NGSS, and the C3 Framework might be easier to integrate into the classroom.
PUTTING THE KIDS IN CHARGE
So what does shifting that framework look like? Many conversations revolve around putting the students in charge of more of the day-to-day happenings in the classroom. “When he pitched Operation Smile to reluctant governments, Mullaney sometimes referred to cleft children as ‘nonperforming assets’ who, with simple surgery, could be returned to the economic mainstream.” Are we struggling with these new initiatives because we aren’t trusting the kids enough? Are we not seeing the growth we’d like to see in our students because our current classroom structure makes them “nonperforming assets” that we haven’t fully incorporated into our educational economy?
The authors of Think Like a Freak say that “there is a tendency to assume that the way people behave today is how they’ll always behave . . . [but] when a rule changes, behavior does too.” If we start asking more of our students and giving them more responsibility, we might be surprised by the outcome. The students may step up to the plate and show us that they have what it takes to play the game. I don’t know for sure that they will (no one could), but I know that if we don’t give them that chance, we will never find out what they can do.
Sometimes the immediate reaction to change, especially when it requires more of the students, is thinking or saying, “kids can’t do that,” but there really isn’t a basis for this line of thinking. What proof do we have that students can’t do something new if we’ve never tried to have them do it?
What’s more, we would never accept this kind of thinking from our students. We would ask them to push themselves, and if they weren’t willing to push themselves, we would figure out a way to reach them and push them.
We may think of the students who struggle in the classroom today, but maybe in a new setting, with a new structure, with more of a hand in their education they would thrive. At worst, these students would still struggle, and if they're still struggling, they aren't necessarily any worse off than they were. If you had a sick child that wasn’t responding to a specific treatment, wouldn’t you try a different treatment?
So what if we do decide to trust the kids with more in the classroom? Can they handle learning in a different way than all of the adults in their lives were taught? Can they handle so much change? Could they be better at handling change than we are as adults? Are our students really just unused assets? Do we just need to change the framework of the relationship between the teacher and students? Will our students thrive in a classroom structure that isn’t teacher centered; that allows them the take control and wrestle with complicated ideas, tasks, and texts? Should we put more responsibility on the shoulders of the students? Will any of this work?
I can’t help but think that all of these questions (and more) are worth asking. Even if they don’t lead directly to answers, they might lead to other questions that lead real solutions. These two ideas, a framework shift and nonperforming assets, might be solutions to the challenges we are struggling with, and they might not.
To be perfectly honest, I just don’t know, but I think we need to try.
Levitt, S., & Dubner, S. (2014). Think like a freak: The authors of Freakonomics offer to retrain your brain. New York: William Morrow.
