Where is the student’s responsibility for their learning?
Report season is coming and a fresh, new season of abuse from parents approaches. I will soon be contacted by many parents asking, “Why did my child get a ‘D’? Why didn’t you say something earlier so that they could have done better?” In this school, I have to give consequences to students who do not complete their classwork or homework, and I have to contact home. To do this every day means that I would be contacting approximately one hundred parents a day, either via email or phone. It is the school’s policy to keep parents up to date on their child’s learning. Mostly, keep them up to date on when they are not completing their learning.
This approach to teacher admin leads to the work piling up. I am approximately three weeks behind in contacting parents. Students who stopped working consistently three weeks ago (or never started working this term) are getting worse because neither myself nor their parents are hounding them to do their work. And parents are wondering why they are just hearing about the issues in their child’s learning now when it is an issue that began weeks ago.
There are a number of issues with this approach, and underpinning these issues is the placement, or misplacement, of responsibility on student learning. Learning is a partnership between teachers, students and parents/carers. In this system of constantly updating parents about whether or not their child did their work today, students are removed from that partnership; it makes teachers and parents slave-drivers and prison-wardens as we tick-off task completion and give consequences, like picking up rubbish (teachers) or not seeing friends on the weekend (parents), to the little automatons we are creating (students).
Without students, the partnership becomes one between parents and teachers. However, teaching and learning is in the job description of teachers, so if a student isn’t completing their work, then it must be the teacher’s fault. Many parents then remove themselves from the partnership and shift blame and responsibility onto teachers. Now the partnership is gone, and the sense of responsibility weighs on teachers, some of whom crumble under the barrage of blame and either stop caring about teaching and learning, producing mind-numbing lessons and losing their passion, or they leave teaching all together, adding to the increasing rate of teachers leaving the profession.
Students need to be empowered and instructed in how to take responsibility for their own learning. They need to learn the consequences of their decisions when it comes to completing or not completing their learning. If your child gets a ‘D’, then they need to see that it is the direct result of their decisions not to complete the learning provided that develops their skills and allows them to demonstrate the criteria teachers are required to assess.
Teachers put a great deal of effort into their teaching and learning. However, our classrooms are often an example of the old adage: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can not make it drink”. Teachers can work so hard, but in the end, students will still avoid completing work, distract one another, and then blame their teachers for their poor outcomes. This generation of students, fueled by a culture of instant gratification, want everything given to them easily. Whenever they are encouraged to try new things, to think for themselves, there is always the complaint that the work or activity is “too hard”. There is no concept of hard work in their approaches to learning. And with this expectation that everything should be given to them, they place no value on what they have, on the work it takes to get the things that matter, and take no responsibility for themselves because they, very sadly, can’t see the value in who they are.
In the past, I have taught students in low socio-economic areas who experience violence and poverty on a daily basis. At the moment I am teaching in a private school with a student population of mostly middle and upper class students. I look at these students who have everything and squander the education available to them. Their parents are paying a lot of money for their children to attend this private school and, as such, they expect to see results. So, rather than getting their children to develop responsibility for their learning and behaviours, they place the responsibility of their child’s learning on the teachers, and if they don’t hear anything from the teacher about how their child is going, then they just assume their child is doing fine. Parents need to model responsible behaviours, encourage their children to understand the value of the learning provided, and to support teachers in their role rather than making demands and blaming teachers. Why aren’t more parents checking on their child’s learning?
Students can be encouraged to take responsibility through creating and assessing their own learning goals, developing an appreciation of the learning process rather than getting the ‘right answer’ through open-ended learning activities, reflecting on the relevance of the skills they are learning as well as the content, and recognising the short-term and long-term implications of their decisions to shift responsibility for their own decisions and actions. We need to encourage them to see the bigger picture.
