The Compromising Effects of CULTURE
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Yogi Berra was full of logical-but-comically-nonsensical, overly literal turns of phrase like this, and this is one of my favorites.
As classroom teachers, we are confronted with hundreds of decisions a day, from the tiny and inconsequential, to the large and far-reaching. Without having the time and awareness to fully consider these decisions and the impact of our choices, we tend to instinctively classify them as either/or decisions and force ourselves to compromise by choosing one path that short changes some aspect of our teaching. We’re at a fork in the road, but we’re not “taking the fork.”
Many of these metaphorical forks involve the CULTURE in our classrooms.
Take for example a situation where you are having a difficult time with classroom management. Students are not working with their peers very well. They’re getting off-task very easily when asked to work with even one other person and then it’s hard to pull them back to anything productive for the rest of class. And working with materials? Forget about it… But, in an upcoming lesson, there is an incredibly important learning activity that will require them to work in a small group with some manipulatives to really understand the day’s objective. Do you choose to go forward with the lesson as planned knowing that students will likely be unproductive (and you will probably have a huge headache at the end of the day)? Or do you choose a less impactful learning activity that avoids groups and manipulatives altogether?
It’s a cultural fork in the road — and you’ve laid out an either/or decision. Sacrifice culture or sacrifice learning.
But there’s a third “taking the fork” option that breaks apart this dichotomy: consciously build the CULTURE you need to support the best methods for learning. Rather than compromising either culture or learning, you’re taking the fork by rejecting the idea that you need to choose between them. It’s not the simple or the quick solution, by any means, but it’s the right solution in the long term.
Another scenario (one that I actually saw in a classroom this week and explicitly heard the teacher explain its compromising effect): You’re having a hard time delivering full-class instruction to students. They aren’t engaged. They don’t pay attention and you often are talking over them to try and catch the few kids who are still trying to listen. And by the time they get to practice, they haven’t actually taken anything meaningful in that can help them show mastery of the objective. But when they’re in small groups or you work with them one-on-one, you can keep their focus for longer periods of time and at least some of what you’re saying sticks with the kids. They’re better behaved in group or partner work too — maybe not 100% and maybe not all on-task, but much better than when they’re full class. So do you choose to continue unproductive whole group instruction that you know is a cultural mess? Or do you move to all small group instruction that requires you to deliver the same lesson multiple times to multiple smaller groups of kids and leave 3/4 to 4/5 of your class unmonitored but behaving in a “tolerable way” while you do so?
The teacher in this scenario definitely did not take the fork in the road. The CULTURE of her room had a compromising effect on her instruction when, shockingly, she decided that only doing small group instruction was the only path she could take at this fork in the road.
Other problems have already begun to appear down this path. More forks. More compromises. And there will continue to be more forks in the road until she decides to TAKE the fork by refusing to compromise.
Where is CULTURE putting forks in the road of your classroom? Are you responding by making compromises to your instruction or your culture? Or are you taking those forks in the road by refusing to follow the false paths the forks makes you consider?
