A tough audience…….
In my other life, I am a musician. I’ve stood on the stage in front of a number of audiences. Some audiences are great. They face the right direction. They clap at the right times. They laugh at the jokes. Some audiences are tough. The audience at the bar on the night of the Super Bowl really just thinks you’re in the way of the large format TV screen. They can’t wait for the set to be over. The audience in the MBTA subway station is really just passing by on the way to the train. Sometimes (sometimes!) you get through to a commuter who forgot their earpods, but it’s rare*.
(*Yes I have played music in the subway stations — that’s a story for a different post).
I have seen many audiences, and at some level, students are also an audience. On the spectrum of audiences, I’d put students on the “tough” side. At best, they’re looking in the right direction. However, sometimes the laptop/ phone/ tablet/ phablet/ smart watch/ late lunch is in the way. Sometimes they look like they are bored out of their minds. At those times, I’d like to have a big mirror at the front of the class so they could see what I see during class. I do my best to be animated, energetic, upbeat, and unflappable.
The class is “Understanding and Evaluating Education” and the main theme is understanding assessment at multiple levels — assessment of students, teachers, schools, communities, and nations. Yes — we are ambitious. All of the students have had some experience with assessment, and part of the challenge of the class will be to connect students’ experience with assessments, understand them, and expand upon it to give students a deeper understanding of their own experience and a broader understanding of the palette of strategies teachers can use.
In the shadow of the ambitious overarching goal of understanding the complex system of assessment, my goal for the second day of class is to make sure they understand that the readings are important. That we will be discussing and using the reading topics in class, and so they should do the readings before class so we build on those ideas. I wonder what are the “right” activities to be doing during class? In surfacing the key issues in education, our shortcomings become very clear. Reading, discussing, watching videos can be easy to engage in only casually. I aim to have students evaluating, applying, designing, synthesizing.
These ideas bring me back to an ongoing struggle.
- How do we get students to be doing the types of activities that engage them in learning the material?
- How do we show that people are learning something? (Evidence of Learning)
I had a great plan. We did a reading before class and I had given them guiding questions they could use while reading the article. During class, I did a “jigsaw” by assigning groups of students to each one of the questions. The discussed that question, create a slide that summarized their discussion, and then report out to the entire class on their discussion. That slide would be evidence of their learning about the topics in the reading, and a way for us to learn from each other.
I told them the plan. Groups — discuss question — create slide — report out. Sounded pretty straightforward. OK — now get into groups.
One student lifted their head off of their hand and asked “what do you mean”? I said, well find a group of 3 other people. If you need help then I’ll help. Quizzical looks. “OK, how about we count off — 1, 2, 3…”. The idea of group selection by counting was generally unappealing, so they self assembled into groups.
Before class, I divided up each of the guiding questions onto different slides. Or — I thought I had. As it turns out, I had cut and pasted the same question onto some slides, and students were confused. Groups 3 and 4 had different numbers but the same question. Group 1 and group 5 also got mixed up. My original goal was to have each groups focus more deeply on one question and share their ideas about that question with the whole class. Here’s where the jigsaw falls to pieces and the improvisational nature of teaching kicks in. Some groups did the same question, and I was cool with that. “Same question but a different perspective!” was my outward cheery response while“Double check the slides next time” was my internal message. Everyone got a chance to report out on their slide and share some of their ideas about the reading on the goals of assessment.
Students can be a tough crowd. Even if you eschew the “stage on the stage” to be the “guide on the side”, someone has to corral the conversation and shepherd it back to the learning objectives. As chief shepherd for this particular class, my students become an audience to my intentional goals (engaging them in the material in creative ways) and unintentional mistakes (numbering issues on slides) along the way.
So today’s class reminded me to let go of the carefully crafted lesson plans — the grand jigsaw ideas that result in epiphanies — the amazing aha moments — and accept the idea that critical thinking can be a laser focus on the details of the lesson plan. Critical thinking can be critical — and it can feel like they are not getting the bigger picture here — but it’s still thinking. They are trying to figure it out.
Even though the small groups were able to do some discussion about the reading, I was not satisfied with the level of engagement. I wanted students to engage more with the material. I firmly believe that there’s a limit to what can be extracted from reading and discussing. I want to have the students in do the work of teaching during the course. That’s the goal for the next class. Stay tuned…….
