Once upon a time, all teachers were students. As the years go by, teachers are further removed from personal experience, forgetting what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a lecture—the fifth lecture that day.
With that in mind, Alexis Wiggins, the newly hired “Learning Coach” at an international private school, decided to shadow two students. Her goal? To better understand students' learning experiences to help support teachers and administrators with curriculum and scheduling decisions. The results from Wiggins’s shadowing experience, as posted on education leader Grant Wiggins’s personal blog, demonstrate how teaching in a vacuum—without feedback or understanding of the students’ experience—can lead to an oppressive, rather than conducive, learning environment.
“I literally sat down the entire day.”
Wiggins’s school follows a block schedule to allow for more continuous instructional time per subject. Adding time to each class, however, means that students will be seated for long periods of time in enforced inactivity.
Wiggins notes that “We forget as teachers [that students are sitting most of the day] because we are on our feet a lot—in front of the board, pacing as we speak, circling around the room to check on student work, sitting, standing, kneeling down to chat with a student as she works through a difficult problem … we move a lot.”
But students do not. In response, Wiggins suggests building in “hands-on” activities into every class. While it might “sacrifice some content” in order to find the time, Wiggins maintains that students absorb little through traditional “hour-long, sit-down discussions.”
“… so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.”
Wiggins observed that students had little opportunity to contribute personally to class discussion. Sure, there were reasonable explanations for this: teachers talking, student presentations, board work, testing, and all the general classroom activities you’d expect at a school.
Students came away from their school day having “absorbed information but not often grappled with it,” according to Wiggins’s notes. Her host-student Cindy apparently laughed when Wiggins asked if she “felt like … the class missed out on the benefit of her knowledge or contributions.”
Wiggins has several suggestions to correct this problem. If she could redo her old classes, she’d offer “brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities following,” as well as keep an egg timer on her desk whenever she was in teacher-lecture mode. Once the timer went off, she’d be done—“end of story”—to allow for better student absorption of material.
“I lost count of how many times we were told to be quiet and pay attention.”
While she said it was “normal” and “understandable” for teachers to need attentive silence, Wiggins found she empathized with students who were constantly corrected. Students squirming, her post implies, is natural, the same way adults feel the need to “disconnect, break free” after long professional development sessions. So it’s not because teachers were “boring,” Wiggins surmises—rather, students had been “sitting and listening [for] most of the day already. They have had enough.”
And teachers’ impatience with their students was an open secret in the classes Wiggins attended, with “a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students”—something Wiggins admitted that made her reflect on her own impatience with students in classes past. Answering the same question several times is tedious, of course, but from the students’ perspective, stress and anxiety before an exam can prevent them from absorbing the answers.
As a mother, Wiggins found previously undiscovered “wells of patience and love” to help her manage her children. If she were to return to the classroom, Wiggins would rediscover that patience and redirect it toward her students. “Questions,” she wrote, “are an invitation to know a student better and create a bond with that student. We can open the door wider or shut if forever, and we may not even realize we have shut it.”
On a more tangible note, she suggested implementing a “five-minute reading period” for the students to ask questions and review instructions, during which no one is allowed to write or fill out their test, to reduce repeated questions. It’s a “simple solution” and one she felt would have “head off a lot … of the frustration I felt with constant, repetitive questions.”
Students’ educational experiences today may be vastly different than those your teachers remember from their time in college and grade school. Try shadowing some of your students for a day—sitting through their classes, taking their tests, finishing their homework—and see if your school is achieving the educational environment both curriculum and training have promised to deliver.
Additional ISM resources:
Research: Research Outcomes: The ISM Student Experience Study (SES) 2010–11
Private School News Vol. 12 No. 4 Planning Your Classrooms to Maximize Thinking Space
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 37 No. 4 Research Outcomes: The Student Experience Study
I&P Vol. 38 No. 15 Match Points Ease Scheduling Challenges
I&P Vol. 35 No. 4 Scheduling and the Harried Teen
