““…The traditional view is of a teacher as gatekeeper, sorting out students, not letting them to a diploma without the proper amount of effort to make it through the gate.
This does 2 things which are undesirable. First, it sets up teachers to be in an adversarial position against students, which often sets students up to feel that they have to be opposed to learning as well as the teacher. And second, it makes failure a terrible, terrible thing. I would argue that failure actually is a critical ingredient in learning (as Edison would attest).
The gardener approach flips that around, where the teacher is on the same side as the student, helping them attain measurable standards of learning, and letting students gauge their growth themselves. The student drives the data collection and assessment, looking at their learning against those standards and determining 1) how much further they have to go, and 2) how they are going to get there. The teacher encourages and facilitates learning.
The way to be a gardener instead of a gatekeeper is to ditch grading, which is teacher-centric, arbitrary, and set up for comparisons against other students for the purpose of ranking (and rejecting). In its place is to use standards-based reporting, where the standard of learning is objective and measurable, and students are not comparing themselves against anyone else but the standard….”
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MeTA musings: It’s not ALL about standards-based reporting…
About a month ago I had this talk with my AP Physics kids. I started by saying that if I had my way I would get rid of grades altogether because they work against real learning. This quote is great, but the whole post is worth reading.
“ 1. Be interested in your subject.
2. Know your subject.
3. Know about the ways of learning: The best way to learn anything is to discover it by yourself.
4. Try to read the faces of your students, try to see their expectations and difficulties, put yourself in their place.
5. Give them not only information, but “know-how,” attitudes of mind, the habit of methodical work.
6. Let them learn guessing.
7. Let them learn proving.
8. Look out for such features of the problem at hand as may be useful in solving the problems to come — try to disclose the general pattern that lies behind the present concrete situation.
9. Do not give away your whole secret at once — let the students guess before you tell it — let them find out by themselves as much as is feasible.
10. Suggest it, do not force it down their throats. ”
“I want to say a word about hope here.
I want to say a word about how the most important thing is just to show up, to have faith, to be present, to fuck up and know it and still love yourself completely, and show up the next day, still with faith and a willingness to be present, to really see what is happening in this moment, now.
I want to say a word about how a person can spend 4 years teaching and feeling incompetent and frustrated and like it doesn’t matter, and then out of the blue, for relatively unimportant reasons, ten kids that you taught when you were just starting, tell you without hesitation or qualification how you changed their lives, and then go back to talking about pizza and what they’re going to do after school.
I want to say a word about the importance of uncomplicated friendship that rejuvenates and inspires, clarifies, answers, supports.
I want to say a word about gratitude. To be able to notice any of this is the whole point, I think.
We are revolutionaries, all of us, each of us doing the best we can, loving and hoping and serving every day, even the ones that feel like a total sham. Eat it. Enjoy it. Live it. Trust it. Take it. It’s yours.
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This was the attitude of one of my graduate program professors. The class met outside and we hiked around talking about school. It was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken.
“ Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself. ”
A great article that’s worth revisiting every six months.
Last year during the first week of AP Physics class I lectured.
This year, the first week behind us already, I haven’t lectured once. Instead we’ve solved problems and analyzed video. So glad to have last year behind me and this year ahead.
Two recent edublog posts that relate to my goal of no longer grading homework:
A related idea directed at those who would say, “Kids won’t do homework if you don’t grade it.” Let’s imagine grouping our students into four categories:
Now what?
“ When they want to see more methods, they’ll let you know. When they become discontented with their ideas of proof, they’ll let you know. And it WILL happen. Because there will always be kids who ask themselves and their peers: “Why does that work? Why does that make sense? How do you know?” And that’s all we need to nurture in them: their own natural curiosity, rather than suppress that and replace it with curiosity about only the following: What does the teacher think? What does the teacher want me to say or do? What do I need to do to get an A? ”
“ Consider this one example from my recent experience. I attended a conference of school counselors, where the latest ideas in the realm of student counseling were being presented. I went to a session on the development of self-discipline and responsibility, wondering what these concepts mean to people embedded in traditional schooling. To me, self-discipline means the ability to pursue one’s goals without outside coercion; responsibility means taking appropriate action on one’s own initiative, without being goaded by others. To the people presenting the session, both concepts had to do solely with the child’s ability to do his or her assigned class work. They explained that a guidance counselor’s proper function was to get students to understand that responsible behavior meant doing their homework in a timely and effective manner, as prescribed, and self-discipline meant the determination to get that homework done. George Orwell was winking in the back of the room. ”
John Taylor Gatto - 01 The Elite Private Boarding Schools (via rinkuhero)
14 Principles of Elite Private Schools:
1.) No kid should graduate without a theory of human nature attained through the study of History, philosophy, theology, literature, and law.
2.) Every graduate has a strong experience with the active literacies: writing and public speaking.
3.) Insight into the major institutional forms: courts, corporations, military, etc.
4.) Repeated exercises in the forms of good manners and politeness, based on the fact that these things are the basis of future relationships.
5.) Independent work. (Contrast with public school where the teacher is tasked with filling 90% of the class time.)
6.) Energetic physical sports are not a luxury, but are rather the only way to confer grace on the human presence.
7.) A complete theory of access to any workplace or any person. (Imagine an assignment for a student to get a personal meeting with the governor.)
8.) Responsibiity as an utterly essential part of the curriculum. Always grab for responsibility when it is offered, and always deliver more than what is expected.
9.) Arrive at a personal code of standards. Standards of production, behavior, and morality.
10.) Familiarity with the master creations of the arts so that you are at ease within all the arts.
11.) Realize the power of accurate observation and recording. (Drawing is Gatto’s example.)
12.) The ability to handle challenges of all sorts. Challenges are different for different people.
13.) A habit of caution in reasoning to conclusions.
14.) The constant development and testing of judgements. You make judgements, but you keep an eye on results to see how you’re doing.
“ There is never any busy work at the Harkness Table. Instead of a math book with an endless number of identical problems and the answers in the back of the book, your math teachers write their own text and design problems that will challenge you. ”
