This is the fourth of five essays over the past few weeks. The first three, Release Your Personality, Tap Their Spirits and Engage Their Minds have been posted previously and can still be viewed on this blog. Collectively, the five essays in A Teacher’s Compass were born of my attempt to conceptualize in plain language the essential elements of exceptional teaching. They comprise my credo of teaching, my best advice to the novice and veteran teacher alike. (Each element is discussed more fully in a book I am writing; these essays here are short summaries of the elements.) As always, I encourage replies.
#4 Navigate Their Limits. This element may well be the hardest one of all, but one that makes a tremendous difference in the amount and quality of learning we glean from our students. The good news is that it is easier to do if the other four elements are in place and practiced consistently. (We’ll talk about the final element #5, Prove You Care, next week.) Most teachers know the oft-spoken adage that it’s better to overestimate the abilities of our kids than to underestimate them. To be sure, it is always easier to suddenly back off than to suddenly become more challenging. That’s pretty good advice. But the idea here is to strike that space between, where kids are pushed to point of giving up without actually doing so. It is within this space that the greatest amount of quality learning occurs. The single most common gripe I hear during interviews with students is that their teacher is too easy and ‘treats us like we’re babies’. And the interesting thing is that this common criticism comes with equal frequency from high and low-ability kids. We sometimes go so slow – particularly with low-achieving kids - in our attempt to keep them from giving up and shutting down that we actually cause those behaviors to occur. Kids of all ability levels do not like being talked down to and they generally rise to amazingly high levels of expectation time and again if those expectations are clear, reasonable and supported by hard work and caring from their teacher. To assume they are capable is be right nearly always. To assume they are incapable is to be right nearly always as well. When expectations are low, students spot that quickly and respond in kind, becoming lazy and uninvolved as they sit back and let their teachers do all the work. I suppose this is human nature; teachers react similarly to administrators whose expectations of teachers are low. Worse still, teachers of low-achieving kids who underestimate what their students are capable of achieving serve to widen the achievement gap though all the while they believe they are giving these kids a chance. In actuality, they are inadvertently ripping them off.
I choose the word navigate very deliberately. It implies continually adjusting. It connotes the inherent obstacles and difficulties, and alludes to the care with which we must steer the level of our instruction in this space between too hard and too easy. There is a continuum between too easy and too hard; the goal is not to strike the middle, but to shoot for that place just shy of too hard. It’s important to realize that this continuum is not static, but dynamic, and must be carefully accessed for each topic, each unit, each lesson, each project; indeed, for each student.
too easy shoot for this too hard
In my 20-something year teaching career, I have been blessed to have taught Algebra 1 to a class of high school seniors populated with 19 year olds (several of whom were convicted felons) as well as having taught high-achieving juniors in AP Calculus. I have learned that the continuum holds true for both. And while the endpoints of too easy and too hard may be defined differently, the notion is the same: Decide their limits by shooting high and assuming they can, assess their progress constantly, support them at every turn and be amazed at their accomplishments. And yours too. Navigate Their Limits. dven.
(to be continued…)
