If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Mistaking Compliance For Learning

Instructional Coach Jaclyn Karabinas on the lesson she learned from one student’s resistance to reading logs

“The teacher cannot be the tow truck that drags a child through each standard, even if it gets him there faster, but the teacher can be the gas station attendant or roadside assistant that provides fuel, feedback, and a reassuring pat on the back so the child can get there on his own . . . and keep going.”

— Kristine Mraz and Christine Hertz, A Mindset for Learning

Have you ever sat back and watched — really watched — your classroom? If you stepped back and observed your students, would you see and feel a flow of learning, despite the fact that you are not directly involved in every move, every moment?

Teachers and authors Kristine Mraz and Christine Hertz pose this question when speaking to educators: If your classroom were the world, would you want to live there? Our classrooms cannot be places where every move is predetermined by another person. The world doesn’t function that way. Sure, students of varying ages and developmental levels will need support depending on the situation, but skills of independence, collaboration, and thinking need to be our goals. In this kind of classroom, kids need opportunities to practice these skills with a teacher acting not as a puppeteer but rather as an “invisible force . . . but a force nonetheless” (Mraz and Hertz 2015).

Thinking back to my first few years of teaching, I remember the thrill of finally being in the place I truly belonged.

My heart would trudge through practices that did not feel as though they matched my beliefs for teaching and learning. I was so young, tirelessly working to be the best teacher I could be for my students, while looking to seasoned colleagues to learn from their routines. As a young teacher, I found it extremely hard to rely on intuition. I wanted so deeply to do the job right that I quickly adopted what others had always done even though my instinct said not to. A lack of confidence can blind our vision of education, leading us toward routines of compliance in our classrooms that don’t support students’ ownership of their learning.

Reading logs. Oh, reading logs. In my early years of teaching, one of the first practices I obediently fell into was the dispersal of reading logs. At first, it made so much sense to me: Students would track their reading, note the number of pages read, and the minutes that passed. Accountability for students, accountability for me. On Friday, they turned them in, sealed with a parent or guardian’s signature, which “proved” all that reading really happened. Think about that — proof that books had been read! At the International Literacy Association conference this past July, Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer, shared sound reasoning: If you talk to your students about their reading, their heart will tell you they read it. Talking about reading is an exchange full of authenticity, creating reflective conversation about books and their impact on a reader.

Was a signature really the most authentic way for students to share their reading life with me? Did it provide me with the information I needed to help them grow as readers? No! In fact, it sent one message and one message only: I can only be sure you are reading if you write it down and someone signs it. I conveyed that message of distrust in the name of “efficiency.”

I always had the nagging feeling that this practice created a vicious cycle in my class.

Those who completed the log successfully, week after week, were compliant no matter what the assignment or task might be. Yet, it wasn’t pushing them to set goals, reflect on reading, or make recommendations to classmates. For those who didn’t identify as a reader or could never find a parent at the right time to get the signature, this practice perpetuated — and likely worsened — negative attitudes toward reading. It strengthened the bad idea that reading was something you did because you were told to, not because a book called to you. Over time, I ditched the signature and designed two styles of logs from which students could choose. This decision was a step in the right direction, but I wasn’t there yet. Something was still missing.

One day, I was conferring with Shannon, a 4th grader. She shrugged when I brought up that although she read avidly, she rarely turned in her logs, and when she did, she rushed to fill them in, hiding in the hallway by her locker. Her response? She loved to read and was so immersed in where the story would go next or what her next book would be that she “wasn’t interested” in writing it all down. She showed a genuine lack of concern about losing points or the message it sent about her responsibility. Then it hit me — reading logs weren’t about responsibility at all! In this fashion, they were about one thing: compliance.

If I knew then what I know now, many routines would have been much simpler to reconsider, revise, or replace with knowledge gleaned from seasoned educators around the world. Today we teachers have virtually infinite access to the experience of colleagues worldwide through professional networks on social media, as well as reading blogs that consider reading research, examine practices, and challenge the status quo. We can discover the practices of those who design instruction through what Kathy Collins calls “collabrovisation” — the infusing of improvisation into collaboration in lieu of making “efficient” decisions through strict compliance (Collins 2015). Routines such as assigning nightly homework (without consideration for any learning outcomes that day), photocopying a term’s worth of reading logs (devoid of consideration of what real readers do), and giving Friday spelling tests (despite knowing students should learn at their own pace) are the products of compliant cooperation among teachers, efficient and linear decisions made with little regard for the message this sends to kids and its impact on their engagement.

In Engaging Every Learner (2015), Patricia Vitale-Reilly explains that engagement is never taught, but rather cultivated. Drawing upon the research shared by Matthew Bundick and colleagues in their article Promoting Student Engagement in the Classroom (2014), Patty describes three dimensions of engagement: behavioral, cognitive, and emotional. Practices that call for compliance over critical thinking will not cultivate these dimensions. They will smother them.

If we want students to come to school ready to think, learn, and share, they need to feel that school welcomes and cultivates these behaviors, complete with an open invitation for thinking and risk taking.

So many students arrive to school each day with numb expectations, the youthful version of death and taxes: signed reading logs, nightly math worksheets, and “LATE” stamps on papers arriving after a teacher-required point in time.

Shannon’s quiet act of rebellion made plenty of noise. Here was someone who LOVED to read, knew herself as a reader, never had a problem choosing books, and was annoyed by reading logs. With this conversation, Shannon unknowingly gave me permission to join her annoyance. What did this mean for all of the others? I wondered.

When aiming to make change in the classroom, I did what I’ve learned is always the best first move when aiming to make change in the classroom — I asked the kids. We sat down as a class and pulled back the curtain to examine the rationale, if any, behind this act of compliance. By opening the conversation I’d had with Shannon to the whole class, I was able to build an accurate picture of what my students felt was truly valuable for tracking their reading lives. And you know what? They wanted the same things I wanted: to celebrate a growing list of titles, make recommendations to peers, respond in writing to share their thinking, and look for patterns on the types of books they devoured or detested.

I didn’t feel ready to abolish all acts of tracking reading, because I knew this countered a message I wanted to convey as well. By allowing students to establish reading goals and design their own methods for chronicling their reading, we finally got closer to my aim as a teacher. I could now witness my students as readers, support those who weren’t sure where to begin, and celebrate everyone’s progress. Was it hard to find a system to keep up with the diverse reading lives of a group of students? Absolutely! But it was a choice I had to make for the sake of their engagement. Because teaching isn’t about what is convenient for the teacher — it’s about what is best for kids.

Changes such as these can feel daunting, but we don’t need to take that first step alone.

Through conversations with my students, professional networking, and reading — tons of reading — I found the support I needed to create a classroom that enabled cultivation of the dimensions of engagement. Not a place of students moving through a checklist set in motion by me. Not a place where each day would hold a drumbeat of predetermined inevitables. Not a classroom of compliance. We worked hard as a community of learners to get to a place where students were empowered to make choices that fuel their love of learning and, where my practices matched what I knew in my heart to be good and true about teaching and learning.