I Wish My Teacher Knew

by Kyle Schwartz

  I see my students make an active choice to learn, not just demonstrate compliant student behavior. What’s more, I see students encouraging their peers to make that same choice. Choosing to learn takes grit. It takes perseverance and resiliency, and we need to tell children the truth about this. In an age of school and teacher accountability, we are missing something if we don’t teach our students that they are the ones who need to take ownership of their own learning.

  5. Labels Are for Cans, Not People

  One night, I was at a party chock-full of teachers. With a room like that, we could have only been discussing one thing: school. One man made a comment about the success he had found in his classroom with an “autistic student.”

  Another teacher at the party said, “You know you should really say ‘student with autism.’”

  “Why? Just to be politically correct?”

  She replied, “No, it just makes sure that we are talking about the student first, not their diagnosis or disability. It’s just a few extra syllables, you’ll get used to it.”

  As teachers we label students all the time. We use acronyms and proficiency bands as shorthand, saying students are “unsatisfactory” or “advanced.” We have all heard terms like “good kid” and “problem student.” In our data-driven instructional worlds, our students are placed into buckets, each with a corresponding label.

  Yes, teachers do need to be able to categorize in order to group students with similar needs so we can deliver highly targeted instruction. We also need to leverage the different abilities in our classrooms. We need to be able to describe the barriers affecting our students, but I argue that we can do this in ways that do not put fixed and self-determining labels on them.

  I propose we get honest with ourselves as educators. Chart out all the labels we put on students—all of them. Root out all the little ways we describe students in conversation, in documents, in test scores. List them all. It would be wonderful to do these activities with colleagues, but you could just as easily do them as an individual teacher. Then decide. Is this a label we want to keep, eliminate, or change?

  I do not have definitive changes to make for all these labels, but I am interested in starting the conversation about it. That being said, I feel there are strong arguments for changing and eliminating some of these labels. It might serve students well to completely eliminate highly charged labels.

  Our assistant principal at Doull Elementary, Rob Suglia, has a background in teaching students who qualify for special education services. “When I taught middle school students, my job was to support students who had documented learning disabilities and also to support general education teachers. Yes, I taught students who had individual education plans and, technically, my position was ‘special education teacher,’ but to the students I was Mr. Suglia, another math teacher.” When he told me this it was like a lightbulb turning on.

  Why can’t we refer to a special education teacher as a “fifth-grade teacher?” There is power in this, says Suglia: “We placed a strong emphasis on coteaching. A team of teachers planned together and truly collaborated. In this way, both the general education teacher and the special education teacher were equals. That equality and collaboration is what we want to model for all students.”

  With this in mind, I believe the education community should reimagine the term “gifted and talented.” To me, it does not seem appropriate. To begin with, who is giving out the gifts? And why have so few of my brilliant students received this golden designation? In some situations, the “gift” these students receive seems highly correlated to which zip code they live in, which language is first spoken to them, or how much income is in their home.

  That’s not to say there aren’t students out there with tremendous skills that need to be supported and pushed. I know some of our students have different needs, and sometimes they need to be challenged in a different way than their peers. While we have a real need for this extension to traditional classroom work and professional expertise, labeling some students as “gifted and talented” (in essence defining their skills as passive and fixed) implies that other students are not. This does not fit with what we know about the ability to improve one’s intelligence and skills, or the inclusive communities we are trying to create.

  The labels placed upon students are not benign; they affect our students and our teaching. We owe it to students to carefully consider the language we use. Labels are for cans, not people. By being deliberate and intentional about all labels issuing from our classrooms, we can help empower our students. What’s more, we can allow students to believe in their own ability to accomplish their goals.

  5. Choose Your Level

  I have discovered that there is nothing third-grade students want more than to be fourth-grade students. Similarly, third-grade students want desperately to distinguish themselves from their younger second-grade peers. There is something magical about that one day that changes us from one grade to the next. We all remember that single day when we became a mature, sophisticated high school sophomore and could look down with pity on the clueless freshmen.

  I discovered this when I was having my students use a rubric to evaluate their writing. In the rubric, I gave my students real examples of what a particular essay would look like at four different levels. But I didn’t label each category with a number (1, 2, 3, and 4). Instead, I wrote “1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade.” This worked well because “3” or “3rd grade” was the level of proficiency I wanted them to achieve.

  During the lesson I said, “A second-grade essay would have a basic topic sentence, while a third-grade essay would have a clear topic sentence that gives the reader context, and a fourth-grade essay would also have a clear topic sentence that gives the reader context but also lays out the organization of the essay.” I knew I was onto something when I was interrupted by a student who asked, “But what would a fifth-grade essay have?”

  What My Teacher Doesn’t Know

  Aswad Allen’s Story

  Throughout my life, I have been honored to support so many dedicated students. As assistant dean of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Colorado at Denver’s School of Education and Human Development, it has been a special privilege to help develop teacher candidates. While I can’t think of a better way to spend my days than helping our students and teacher candidates on their path to becoming educators and mental health professionals, when I look back on my own schooldays, I cannot think of a career that was more unexpected for me.

  As a young child, a traumatic event led to me experiencing a severe speech impediment. My anxiety caused me to stammer over nearly every word. Every part of school became challenging. I could not communicate with my teachers, tell them what I understood, nor could I ask for help when I needed it. Educators responded to this by placing me in special education instruction.

  Once being labeled a special education student, I became overwhelmed by a feeling of despair. Even as a young child, I could see that the students I was grouped with had challenges different in nature than mine. Not being able to communicate and believing my speech problem would keep me from ever being heard terrified me. I worried the day when I would finally be heard would never come. That fear quickly transformed into something much more debilitating: embarrassment and shame. Feelings resulting from having been labeled only served to keep me quiet longer.

  The term “special education” was accurate. I did need a form of education that was different and more supportive than did some of my peers. But it was the label itself that did the most damage. At the time, it seemed like it would determine my fate. I thought that my single challenge of communication was enough to overshadow all of my strengths. I could also sense the low expectations my teachers had for me. It would have been easy to allow the label of “SpEd” student to define me, but thankfully my parents had a different vision for my life.

  In middle school, I had the opportunity to start over with different teachers and a differe
nt school. By that time, my stammer was less present, but still I was behind academically. These issues impacted me when I started high school. At the new school I was made to repeat the ninth grade. Psychologically, this led to yet another label: “retained.” Being held back made me feel isolated, and yet it gave me a tremendous amount of personal responsibility. I began to realize it was completely up to me, and me alone, to overcome these challenges and create a new reality for my life.

  With personal persistence and the help of very caring teachers, I was able to overcome the labels placed on me. Graduating from high school and being offered scholarships to attend college affirmed I belonged. I’ve been in school ever since.

  Now I am able to leverage my unique perspective to help others find an appreciation for students who, like me, learn differently. I encourage our teacher candidates to rethink the expectations and assumptions they make about their students. We can empower students when we allow them to define their own identity and set their own goals. The most powerful thing a teacher can give their students is a “voice” in deciding who they are.

  Since then, I have used this method to let students choose their own goals. For important skills my students absolutely need to master before the end of the school year, I simplify my rubrics to only three categories: second grade, third grade, and college.

  Here is a real example from my classroom:

  Allowing students to choose their own level creates motivation for improvement. It teaches them how to set and achieve goals specific to their abilities, in the moment. No longer is their writing good, bad, or almost. It is a matter of choosing which level a student is choosing to work at. Students are remarkably good at self-selecting the level that is best for them.

  Using this system, I rarely have to encourage students to challenge themselves, because the format itself requires them to take charge of the level of work they produce. By offering students choice and a clear path to the next level, they develop self-efficacy while being provided the motivation to constantly get better and move up levels.

  Good teachers believe in their students’ abilities; great teachers teach students to believe in their own abilities. We only have our pupils for a finite amount of time, which means we plant the seeds, yet rarely see the harvest. As educators we cannot merely teach content or standards. We must teach our students how to learn, and that means we need to teach them that they can learn, that they already possess the ability to progress and improve. This trait is essential if we want our students to become lifelong learners.

  By teaching a growth mindset and developing soft skills like optimism and grit, we encourage students to develop the confidence of a learner and be accountable for their own education. When we take the time to deliberately and explicitly teach our students to have a strong sense of self-efficacy, we cultivate a community of learners that can’t be stopped.

  8.

  “I Can’t Wait to Learn More”

  Classrooms Where Student Engagement Thrives

  My Classroom Community

  As quickly as I could, I slammed the doors of my classroom shut. Once again, my students were being way too loud. I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of the wonderful fourth-grade teacher crossing the hall and patiently shutting my door so her class could get their work done.

  I had given my students an assignment to take measurements by using nonstandard units, like how many shoes long a table is. Frantic groups of students were measuring and recording the lengths of as many classroom objects as they could in ten minutes. Then the plan was to have the groups compare measurements. Through discussion, students would arrive at the conclusion that mathematicians cannot invent their own units of measure.

  But the process was loud.

  Students were shouting at their group mates, “The chair is four hands tall!” or “Let’s see how many pencils high the ceiling is!” Kids were standing on tables trying to measure doorways by backpack lengths and running around the room to see who could measure the bookshelf first. It was chaotic.

  Then my principal walked in. I froze. She was quickly followed into the classroom by a woman I did not recognize. “We heard the noise from outside and decided to come in,” my principal explained as several students raced passed her.

  “Oh no, are we being too loud?” I asked apologetically.

  “What are they doing?” The woman asked, gesturing to a group of students lining up markers along the windowsill.

  I explained the idea behind the lesson and asked again, “Are we being too loud? Should I make them stop?”

  “Hmm,” she said, “They certainly seem engaged.” My principal and the woman observed for a few more nervous minutes while the students fervently ran around measuring every object. Then they slipped out.

  Perhaps if I had not been a first-year teacher at the time, I would have recognized exactly what the situation was. I might have known that strangers who enter your classroom wearing impractical shoes, and with a suspicious absence of magic marker or glue stick stains on their clothing, are usually people who work in the school district office. I might have realized the stranger was actually my principal’s boss completing a mandatory classroom observation of the novice teachers.

  That afternoon, I anxiously asked my principal how the classroom visit went. She told me she was glad to see the students so enthusiastic about their schoolwork and that she was impressed that every single student was on task, collaborating, and discussing their work with each other. But then she told me it was probably not a good idea to allow students to stand on the tables—a fair point.

  This experience was one of many that taught me how essential student engagement is in any classroom, and made me grateful that I worked in a school where this was valued. Ideally, a classroom is not a place where students are always compliant and silent. Sometimes highly engaged classrooms can get a little loud and hectic. An engaged classroom is a place where students can’t wait to do the hard work of learning, and to me that’s worth the temporary noise and chaos.

  Why Engagement Is Essential

  When I was in school, I was not engaged. I didn’t know I was supposed to be engaged. I thought my role as a student was to do my work, get good grades, and do my best to avoid getting in trouble. Like many others, I took a pragmatic approach to my education. The best-case scenario was acquiring the best possible grade by expending the least amount of effort. It wasn’t until I had decided on a personal goal of becoming an effective teacher that I truly engaged in my own learning. I saw so many of my classmates have the same disconnected experience in school, but I certainly do not want this for my students.

  According to a report from the Institute for Research and Reform in Education, “There is general agreement that engagement in learning is as important for success in school as it is elusive in the vast majority of traditional, bureaucratic school structures.” The same report found that “by high school as many as 40 percent to 60 percent of students become chronically disengaged from school—urban, suburban, and rural—not counting those who already dropped out.”

  As teachers, we can feel how engaged students are in our classrooms. There is an excitement and an energy. On the best days, students can’t keep themselves from asking questions and are reluctant to go to recess because they need to read just one more page. We also see the opposite when we have to bribe students into doing their best, cajole a class into paying attention, or beg them to just sit still for a few more minutes. Like me, maybe you have found yourself wondering, “I spent so much time on this lesson, why aren’t my students excited about it?”

  This contrast is perfectly described in an article in Educational Leadership: “Most teachers have seen these signs of engagement during a project, presentation, or lively class discussion. They have caught glimpses of the inspired inner world of a child, and hoped to sustain this wonder, enthusiasm, and perseverance every day. At the same time, they may have felt stymied by traditions of reward and punishment. Our challenge is to trans
cend these very real difficulties and provide a practical model for understanding what our students want and need.”

  The term “student engagement” has taken its place among the most popular buzzwords in education. The most prominent researcher focusing on student engagement is former public school administrator, professor, and founder of the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform, Phil Schlechty. In his book Engaging Students, he defines student engagement as having four characteristics. First, engaged students are attentive and on task. Second, students who are engaged are committed and do their work voluntarily. Third, students persist in their work even when it is challenging. Finally, engaged students find meaning in accomplishing their work. These characteristics beg the question, how do we engage students? How do we get them to a place where they are displaying visible joy in our classrooms and authentically incorporating their learning into their lives?

  Relationships Matter

  The relationships we build with our students matter. They allow us to know who our students are, what they need, and how we can best support them. But it’s a two-way street. What we put into our relationships with our students comes back to us in the form of student engagement.

  Researchers from Portland State University found that “over time, warmth, structure, and autonomy support from teachers and peers not only operate as social resources but also help students to construct their own personal motivational resources by promoting positive self-perceptions of relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Students can draw on these resources when they encounter difficulties, coping constructively, re-engaging with challenging academic tasks, and in general developing everyday motivational resilience.”