Phase 3 — Develop Faith for the Individual Student
Post #2.3 — Not exactly a leap of faith, but a transfer of faith.
The current state of education puts a lot of faith into standards and testing. The standards set up the path and testing is the primary force for pulling a student along that path. This is not a bad setup if every student could walk the path at the pace dictated by the state and pass the exam at the end of the year. As we know, there are students who can’t. We put so much faith in a system that is flawed and steam rolls some of our students. As a result, we miss the opportunity to put our faith where it belongs: in every student.
I’d like to share with you an incident that allowed me to shift faith away from the system and place it with the individuals who make up my classroom.
THE ENVIRONMENT
Around 2010 is when I initially started to individualize my Algebra 2/Trig classroom. During my initial years, I only individualized the second half of the year. I started the year with the traditional approach of one lesson, one pace to all. Regardless of how individuals performed, as long as the class did well enough to move on, we did. The steamrolling of my struggling students started at various times for each individual, but my list of failing students submitted at the end of the marking period always included several students from this class and grew as the year moved on.
THE INCIDENT
Like I said above, midway through the year I switched to an individualized setting and we started the trigonometry section of the curriculum. After I established a routine with the students in this new environment, there could be days, even a week, in which I did not directly work with some students. I conducted daily check-ins asking where are you, what do you expect to get done during class. However, when it came down to questions on the material, I waited to be approached. A couple weeks in I was approached by a struggling student. The lesson that she was on was reciprocal trigonometric functions. I remember this fondly because she came up to me and asked me, “How do I find the exact value of this reciprocal trig function?” The problem was secant(30). She then proceeded to tell me that secant was 1/cosine, she knew the exact value for cosine(30), but struggled with the calculation of the complex fraction that the exact value produced. We went over the problem, but upon reflecting upon the experience, I had these thoughts….
- She was a student that was on my failing list. She never asked me questions in class before. I imagine her hesitation in the beginning of the year resulted from the combination of her having weak skills, being a quiet student, and being overwhelmed in the traditional setting. I often think that some of our “quiet” students are quiet because the traditional environment does not allow them to build up the confidence needed to develop a voice. How can a student ask questions about concepts in a curriculum that buries them?
- I was impressed with how she used the vocabulary. She used “reciprocal,” she knew how to express secant using cosine, and had a sense of what the exact value meant. She knew the exact value of cosine(30). Whether she recalled it from memory or had to look it up, she came up to me prepared. I felt like there was a totally different student in front of me than in the past.
- Lastly and the most remarkable, I did not conduct one lesson from this unit in person with her. She did everything on her own. She was a struggling student who had the ability to control the intake of the material presented to her. In that moment, she was a different student than before. She was able to ask the questions that she did and meaningfully engage with the content because she was meeting the curriculum eye-to-eye.
MY FAITH
This interaction with my struggling student was the moment I knew I was onto something. By putting that struggling student in an individualized environment for a couple of weeks I was able to uncover potential that was otherwise buried by my old, traditional approach. That incident marks the starting point in which I shifted faith away from the system and directed it towards each individual student. The next year, I individualized my classroom for the entire year and my only regret is that I did not make this change sooner.
