Are learning tasks ever "simple"?
My conversation with Joanna illustrates that school tasks and processes are more complicated than most people think they are -- and that that's a beautiful thing.
I stood on the L Train platform one morning this week and read a remarkable email from a student. It was 6:45 and the trapped warm, underground air was making me sweat. I can’t go into any detail about the email, but it was the kind of message to which a teacher can only reply with a laugh: motivated by teenage emotions and the desire to assert authority over one’s own life, the student had chosen to share, with pretty astonishing candor, a negative opinion about the class that I teach.
This kind of emotion-motivated (but relatively substanceless) excoriation is something that teenagers know how to do better than anybody else.
The email got me thinking about a particular kind of alchemy in course design, one that can provide an answer to the questions that the haters don’t always realize they should ask. One of my favorite earlier interviews for IRT, with middle school educator Joanna Balla-Elliot, emphasized for me the way that most educational tasks and units combine critical literacies with critical competencies. Put in plain English, most of what happens in a thoughtfully designed primary or secondary course incorporates both skill and content benchmarks. In order to show sufficient mastery of material, students have to both demonstrate the acquisition of knowledge and show that they know how to do something with that knowledge. In an adequately-designed math class, a student will not just be tested on the fact that he’s memorized the quadratic formula, but he’ll also need to illustrate that he can use it and apply it in the appropriate context. Sure, he needs to know something, but at least fifty percent of his work is to illustrate the skill of contextualizing that “something” in the world.
When parents or students or pundits or politicians fight over curriculum, it seems to be to their advantage to simplify this complexity, but it usually undermines the power of their arguments. It’s difficult, because if a student feels that he’s “learned everything already” in previous courses, or that the second Victorian novel is “exactly the same as the first,” then he can easily feel bored. The problem is that while the information may not be new, or significantly new enough to satisfy a student’s desire for novelty, the task connected to it more often than not is new (or, the student is being asked to continue drilling the task/skill until he can demonstrate mastery). Boredom is real, and common, and it often correlates to a student’s strong emphasis on critical literacies and their relative inattention to the critical competencies that, in many cases where the literacy growth seems insufficient to the student, are the more important part of course design.
And, of course, sometimes it’s not the content (information) of the course that’s the issue, but the skills the teacher’s introducing to the classroom. In our conversation, Joanna taught me about a project she was working on with a professor from her graduate school “to bring authentic texts into vocabulary instruction that amplify diverse voices.” The thought of such an approach is that “we can promote a love of words as we teach students to think about their world.” Many readers have a knee-jerk reaction to this idea, especially because Joanna is a middle-grades teacher, because many people believe that in exposing students to a diverse set of writers who present a diverse collection of plot conflicts and resolutions, by extension Joanna is indoctrinating her students into a liberal agenda. That’s not an appropriate debate for this particular platform, particularly because I don’t have Joanna’s curriculum and reading list in front of me; I would urge a reader not to jump to such conclusions. Specifically, I would urge anyone to think about what she’s adding to her course: a diverse set of writers who present a diverse collection of plot conflicts and resolutions. What could be more exciting and motivating to a young person than learning about new worlds and new lives that are different from their own? Equally as important as seeing oneself reflected in one’s curriculum is the thrill of learning about someone different from oneself, especially at a moment in child development when one is able to understand the concept of someone outside of oneself. She’s adding layers to a part of learning to capitalize on a moment when one is beginning to articulate and invest in a moral code of conduct dictating how one responds to others.
Learning vocabulary is cool. Learning vocabulary while expanding your view of the world at a developmentally critical moment is much cooler.
What seems to be serve one purpose in an education usually serves multiple purposes. When educators design courses, especially in more idealized conditions where they have the time and resources to do so, they don’t just think about how to deliver and explain course material. They also consider how students experience that information. How can they teach students to productively question the historical facts that they learn? How can they teach a student to contextualize and apply knowledge from a primary source? How can they ensure variation in students’ skill application to help find and address weaknesses in the student’s ability to use the knowledge they’ve been given?
If the adults in kids’ lives both in and outside of school acknowledge the complexity and intention of learning tasks, it will become much easier to pull students out of their heads and emotions and into the work they need to accomplish. It’s easy to say, “so basically, you’re writing a paragraph,” or “so basically, the kid needs to know a lot of words.” On the most very basic level, a task can be defined and categorized in this way. But often, based on student development, teachers are simultaneously working with students to build foundational knowledge and develop skills, including moral and ethical skills as they are developmentally appropriate. These multiple meanings can result in meaningful learning milestones, though -- and this is important to recognize, too -- students can’t always see that learning in the moment.
As adults, when we think about our lives, most of us can look back on particular moments, relationships, or experiences of varying durations that seemed fairly insignificant at the time but appear much more significant in retrospect. Finding a prom date looms over life for weeks at a time, but the friend who was simply there as part of your life day after day shapes your life forever. Failing a biology test feels like a simple, and enormous, failure in life, but the peer mentor who offered support and sustained your trust shapes your compass in a much more significant way.
This post, then, is really about scale: what feels big versus what the whole landscape looks like. A teacher has to look at the forest as much as possible, to remember how one day of class is going to relate to the whole. A student, almost always, looks at the trees; often, her parents don’t help. Media and casual commentators who pick up on one small slice or controversy of education fuel this forest orientation, failing to contextualize the perceived single meaning of a day or unit or assessment’s importance. Joanna, quoting C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, shared the idea that “the things we see as so solid and permanent just aren’t.” It’s a thought that I lingered over with several colleagues over lunch, too -- that everything moves faster in a school, that ideas and understandings that seem so fixed in the outside world are more dynamic and complex in school. That’s why it’s easy for a student to send an email outside of school that reduces a class to uselessness, even when the classes they’ve experienced have resulted in their learning. What’s solid and permanent, straightforward and simple, isn’t -- it’s much more mutable, more fun, more resonant, and it blossoms in so many more interesting directions.
As Joanna said, “we [come] up with ways to teach ourselves about this new world [we’re] suddently living in.” It can be really upsetting to have an expectation about an experience -- that a course in school will teach you, or teach your children, or teach someone else’s children -- in a specific way, and then to have that expectation be upset by a new valence or organization that seems to rebel against what you expected. It’s not just teenagers who don’t respond well when life doesn’t go as expected -- we all have moments in which we respond emotions-first, and a marker of our maturity is our ability to channel those reactions with care and intention. But the world is always new, and what feels big is never as big as it seems. If our education doesn’t guide students through that confusion, which sometimes leads to wonder and sometimes leads to that special, charming teenage aggression, then they become adults who also struggle to understand that there’s so much more, and different, significance than what they might see in the moment. That there’s more to everything than we can see or know, and whether student or teacher, leader or follower, parent or child, and that this, in the end, learning requires us to remember that.