Guilty As Charged!

Guilty as charged.  I spent the first fifteen years of my career as a Science teacher, who was passionate about the topics covered and loved working with young adults at the high school level.  I think the kids bought into that passion and really seemed to enjoy learning about the various topics covered in each of the classes I taught.  Students came back to visit on college break or would stop by to say, “hello” if they were still in the building but not in my class.  If you asked me at that time, I thought I was doing a pretty good job of teaching and if you asked me what I taught I would, without hesitation, answer Biology or Chemistry or Environmental Science or whatever the subject was at the time.  I don’t ever remember saying, “I teach kids.”  That is why I am guilty as charged.  

It is not that I didn’t care about the kids,  because I did very much, and I think they did pick that up from me (they are very good at that).  I also understood the importance of the students to grow in their ability to critically think and communicate what they were learning.   However, I have to admit, I was in the mindset of what Larry Geni would call a “curriculum transfer model” of teaching.  I thought that it was my job to be sure the students were given the information they needed in order to have the opportunity to be successful students and it was their job to take it all in.  In his FREE on-line book titled “A Teacher’s Handbook”, Geni describes the purpose of a curriculum transfer model of school  is to “transfer a broad and rigorous curriculum into the minds of students”.  I believe that is a common view on teaching  that most educators share. Of course there are many of those  teachers who work very hard to help students understand the material and spend countless hours, much like I did, helping students before, after, and during school, making “quality” assessments, and trying to learn to become the best teacher possible, but there still is that focus on the curriculum transfer aspect.  Geni argues that we educators should make the shift to a “preparing for life model”.

In a “preparing for life model”, the purpose of school is to help prepare students to lead productive, engaged, and satisfying lives”.  As I read his description, I said, “well...yeah...that is what I was trying to do”. [Honestly...please see “Schools as a Greenhouse” or No Child Left in my Basement if you doubt me.  :)]  However, Geni does a great job of describing this purpose and boiling it down to a focus on the students as learners.  Once that mindshift is made, everything you do is impacted and changes how you approach teaching.  By the way, changing how you teach doesn’t make what you did as a teacher prior to that realization wrong, it makes what you are going to do as a teacher after that realization better ( Red Queen Effect).  This shift changes how we: plan, assess, assign or don’t assign homework, ask questions, listen to the kids, collaborate with others, and challenge ourselves to grow as educators.  What that looks like and how that gets done is going to look differently K-12 as well as from class to class within a grade level or even year to year within a class, because the focus will be on helping THIS group of learners to be more prepared to lead productive, engaged, and satisfying lives.  

If you were like me and hadn’t heard of this guy before, I would encourage you to check out his website titled  “The Field Guide to Student Directed Learning” where he states he is sharing “two books, a blog, and a whole lot of tools”.  I haven’t looked through it all yet, but have enjoyed getting lost in the reading and reflecting on how it could apply to our learners.  It could help your school to make that shift from a curriculum transfer model to one that helps learners to lead productive, engaged, and satisfying lives and that is hard to argue against.   Enjoy!