My classroom is student-centered and instruction is blended.  I’ve got 23 Macbook Airs in my room.  I don’t know for sure but I imagine this is my students’ first experience in a student-centered blended classroom.  I say that because their reactions to my classroom indicate pretty clearly the type of classrooms from which they have previously been a part.

In a very general sense, my instruction runs in three phases: Instructional, Practice, Assessment.  It’s a lot more fluid than that, but that’s enough to understand the purpose of this post.  The instructional phase represents the time that I offer the most support.  Perhaps it’s the phase that appears most like a 20th century classroom.  I incorporate a buffet of opportunities for my students to dive into the skill or concept.  The next phase represents the biggest phase, from the standpoint of time.  During the practice phase I often gauge the level of support needed by my students by the number of hands up in the classroom.  During this time, I rarely address the entire class as a whole, rather I spend most of the time down on a knee beside one student or a group of students.  I issue the daily agenda through our learning management system, Canvas, and this allows me to spend more valuable time with my students.  As I said, during the practice phase, students generally get my attention with a raised hand or a verbal cue.  During the class, I find myself constantly gauging the level of support needed by the class, diagnosing common weaknesses, and identifying common strengths.  This means I occasionally need to stop and address the whole class.

I’m realizing, through observation and conversations with students, that the number of hands and verbal cues I’m receiving during the practice phase doesn’t necessarily indicate the level of support students need, rather it indicates the level of support students want.  Putting the problem back on the students means I have to intentionally exercise caution during my interactions with students in order to continually put the problem back on the students.  Most importantly, I have to employ the right kinds of questions when dealing with students.  Questions that require them to think, because it’s likely they would prefer that I respond in a way that liberates them from thinking.  See, the number of hands up during class more accurately indicates the lack of thinking.  The system I have put in place in my class arms each student with opportunities to learn.  In general, I’m finding that they view these opportunities, even using Google, as a way for me to stop teaching.

Ultimately, I’d like for my students to develop resilience, grit, and perseverance that empowers them to relentlessly dig at their problems before giving up and seeking support from me.  

This goal is not achieved without a teacher that is intentionally aware of the effects of each interaction with students seeking support.  It requires the teacher to act more as a coach.  A coach empowers his/her students to hone the skill of learning by putting the problem back on the students.  The right questions are key for a teacher or coach to put the problems back on the students.  For example, one of my students held her hand up for 15 minutes in class this week waiting for me to make it around to offer support.  When I made it to the student, her question was “Is this a negative sign or a minus sign?”  First, bless her heart for holding her hand up in the air for 15 minutes.  I’m afraid she worked harder holding her hand in the air than she did in solving her problem.  My response could have easily been “that number needs to be treated as a negative” and I could have walked away and moved on to the next student.  That would have done nothing to foster resilience or risk-taking in that student.  The situation that exists with this student depicts the struggles in all of my students.  She has never been empowered to take control of her learning, take risks, and accept failure.  These skills are critical to success in today’s global society, yet they are perhaps the most neglected in today’s classrooms.  Students have been conditioned to believe that arriving at the right answer is the only measurement of achievement that matters.  Risking failure or making a mistake is shameful and not something that is embraced by many of today’s classrooms.  The following tips can help you begin to empower students to embrace failure as part of the learning process.  This is critical to putting the problem back on the students.

• Be aware of your language and the impact that it has on cultivating learners.  Praise and encouragement are not the same thing.  Too often praise is given as a result of the product.  It’s more effective to provide encouragement during the process.  Be sure you’re emphasizing the process over the product.
• Questions, questions, questions.  Your questions are key to empowering students to leverage the tools available to solve their own problems.  Your questions should require reflection and risk taking.  Too often students are spoonfed the answers, rather than provided opportunities to think.
  • Can you draw a picture that may help? 
  • What would happen if you tried it? 
  • Is there a similar problem we’ve done that may help us understand this one? 
  • Have you Googled it?  Yes, that’s right.  Teach your students to leverage the tools they will use in the real world.  If you don’t want your students Googling your answers, then start asking better questions.
  • What have you tried that hasn’t worked? 
• Talk about a growth mindset.  Our students should know the term and understand that growth is not limited by prior experience or our genetic makeup.

Having spent about 4 weeks in the high school math setting, I can say with certainty that reaching those students that are hard to reach is not given enough attention in middle school, or at any level for that matter. The quality of math courses at the high school cannot endure the percentage of students sitting in those courses with monumental deficiencies.  A student that has failed 6th grade math, 7th grade math, and 8th grade math lands him or herself in 9th grade math at the high school level a high percentage of time.  That statement is not meant to condemn the practice or lack of practice of holding students back when they can’t perform to a minimum acceptable level.  The statement simply means the system places a growing percentage of students and teachers in a difficult position, to put it kindly.  This post really isn’t meant to spout statements that math teachers have been spouting for years.  Instead, I’m reminded of the importance of reaching EVERY student all the time, especially during the critical years where learning foundations are established.  More specifically, I’m thinking about what that requires.

To combat this cruel series of events that plays out every year, many schools are turning to extra periods of remediation and intervention, loss of recess, extended class periods for math, and a deluge of other techniques that really only increase the time to “learn” math.  Instead, I wish more schools, administrators, teachers, etc. placed more of the focus on improving the experience for those students in their regular math class.  I’m not talking about adding time, taking away an elective so the student can be placed in remediation classes, or doing more of the same thing only longer.  I wish more teachers considered why that student was failing their class instead of how they can get that student to spend more time doing math.  None of that is to say that more traditional means of remediation aren’t or can’t be effective.

It’s time to look at remediation from a comprehensive whole-child perspective.  I feel like we’ve completely overlooked reaching that child during class and jumped straight to “what can we do to that kid during remediation?”  The following list represents the tip of the iceberg, but I wonder what results these would yield in comparison to traditional remediation techniques.

• The failure that is occurring, by teacher and student, can only be remedied if a relationship is present.  In fact, if you’re talking remediation but the conversation doesn’t begin with “How do I get into this student’s bubble?  How do I break the shell?  What can I do to reach his or her heart?” you’re wasting your time talking strategy, technique, or pedagogy.
• Have you called home?  The first call home should be on purpose, it should be early in the year, and it should be positive.  Not sure which students need called?  Unfortunately if you just listen to the previous grade level teachers, they’ll probably indicate who needs a phone call.  The names usually follow “just wait till you have…”
• A handwritten note takes a mere seconds to write.  “Never underestimate the value of a well placed compliment. -Todd Whittaker”  The students that need the most love, the most reinforcement, and the most pats on the backs, ask for it in the most unloving ways.  Don’t let that stop you from writing a 30 second note.  This practice seems easy, but when you’re talking about these students, you have to watch for something positive, on purpose.  I know, positive behaviors may be like Bigfoot, you hear about him every once in a while, but you never see him.  If you watch on purpose, you’ll find something to write about.  Think about it, we watch for negative behaviors all day long and often find them.  Try watching for positive behaviors a while and see what happens.
• Have you given up a lunch break to eat with a student or group of students?
• Have you visited the home?
• I know what you’re thinking, “Gee Wiz Oldfield, there’s no way a person could do all these things.”  The perpetual and consistent failure that these students experience year after year acts like a huge weight on the everyone: teacher and students.  The quality of courses is not enduring this weight that is only getting heavier year after year.  The level of performance is declining and bars are lowering.  What we’ve been doing isn’t working.  Nothing great is accomplished by doing something easy.

I’ll be honest, the focus of this post came from my own frustration entering the high school math realm for the first time this year.  I was previously an 8th grade math teacher for five years.  I often wondered back then how teachers at the high school actually taught their courses at the level required by the standards without failing more students.  I thought one of two things were occurring: the teachers were extraordinary teachers of the kind of talent I could only dream about, or the teachers recognized the cavern between the instructional level of the students and the performance required of the standards and spent the year measuring student learning at the current level then stamped a grade on the report card under a course name that did not really represent what was being taught.  I believe the cure involves better reaching those students who are hard to reach.  Consider the penalty if they get left behind?  Prior to high school, the penalty is… they move on.

Now don’t get me wrong, do I believe instruction and pedagogy need to improve?  You bet I do!  I believe too many students sit in classrooms designed for a style of learning that is irrelevant and disengaging to today’s learners.  That’s for another time.

I regularly read blogs from a circle of educators that I follow on Twitter.  Though I haven’t actually met most of these people face to face, I feel as though I know them well.  Each time I read a new post, I have a good idea where their feelings and thoughts are coming from.  With that in mind, this post comes from an educator entering his 7th year.  Five previous years have been spent as an 8th grade math teacher in a middle school setting.  I became a connected educator about 3 years ago and I started blogging to keep a record of my own growth as an educator.  To be transparent, I’m also in the middle of Learn Like A Pirate by Paul Solarz and many of Paul’s points inspired my motivation to write this post.  I’ve started the change discussed in this post and I wanted to write down my thoughts today.

Rewind 4-5 years ago and the phrase “student-centered instruction” or “learner-centered classroom” were buzzwords I probably would have used in a job interview, but that was the threshold of my experience with those phrases.  Looking back, my preservice training in college wasn’t bad, but I did not enter the profession in 2009 armed with the shifts in teaching that prepares a teacher to reach today’s students.  In fact, my student teaching and my first year as a full time teacher likely reflected the exact same teaching style that I received when I was in middle school back in 1997.  I want this post to highlight some steps any educator could take to begin to move away from a very teacher directed classroom dominated by rules, compliance, and students playing the game of school.  If you’re a teacher today you’ve definitely heard of the phrase “student/learner centered classrooms”.  You’ve likely heard your principal, instructional coach, professional development facilitator spout those terms about your school as if everyone in the building, regardless of experience, knows exactly how to initiate those changes in their own classroom.  Not to mention, the fear and anxiety some educators may feel every time someone stands and talks about a classroom that sounds nothing like their own.

I’m not going to outline these steps in any order, though I’m pretty adamant about the first one.  I realize that whatever order some of these appeared for me, may certainly not be the same order in which they appear for another educator.  The point is, read these points and consider which ones you can begin to initiate now and be brave enough to risk the change and see what happens.  If you haven’t gathered yet, I am a believer in this “new style” of teaching that describes teachers as more of a facilitator of learning than a driver of learning.  In fact, I spent much of the first week last year explaining to my 8th grade students exactly what my role would be.  You see, in a student’s eyes, a learner-centered classroom can sometimes lead a student to believe that the teacher does nothing.  My students’ evidence of teachers’ work is bound to:

• the teacher towering over graded papers
• the teacher standing up front and “teaching” for several minutes before assigning homework and retreating to his/her desk for the remainder of the period
• the teacher rigidly supporting classroom rules by enacting consequences in the form of D-halls, pink slips, you name it
• the teacher adhering to strict deadlines meaning he/she will not tolerate late work and zeroes will be given if such work is turned in late

Notice that all of those actions begin with “the teacher”.  In my students’ eyes, they typically evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher by the actions of the teacher.  This is understandable and I’m not trying to place guilt on any student, not at all.  The classrooms that most teachers today grew up in were dominated by the teacher.  The leading in the classroom was driven by the teacher.  Teachers took part in most of the action (24/7) while students were mostly passive.  The learner-centered classroom seeks to reverse most of the features of 20th century classrooms.  Below you’ll find some shifts that any educator can make to his/her classroom in an effort to transform it into one where students take risks, willingly lead, monitor their learning, and engage.

• As I said above, I feel this first one needs to happen immediately.  It’s difficult to shift and transform yourself and your classroom if your level of feedback to students is suffocating under the level of grades you give.  Let me say that again: feedback needs to heavily outweigh the number of grades your students receive.  As a facilitator of student learning, this is one of your most important jobs and it’s one that your students, regardless of age, probably won’t recognize.  In fact, if you’re good at it, one could argue that the students shouldn’t recognize it.  I sometimes use the analogy of the rudder.  Passengers never see the rudder and rarely can even tell when it’s moving, but it impacts the direction of the ship constantly.  Your feedback can come in the form of a whisper in a student’s ear, sitting with a few students while they work, catching a student during lunch to talk to them about their work, a handwritten note, or a posttest conference.  There are nearly countless ways to offer feedback and perfecting any one of those ways is an art that today’s teachers need to practice.  If your grades outweigh the number of times you offer feedback, make this priority number one.
• Information literacy is perhaps the most important skill our students need today.  The responsibility for this skill cannot be placed on any one teacher, grade level, or department.  21st century teachers are no longer masters of content tasked with unloading this knowledge into the brains of today’s students.  Many of our students come to school with content in their pockets.  The role of any teacher should be to design instruction that provides students opportunities to acquire content and create.  This is a huge task in my opinion, because depending on the grade level, it’s not uncommon for students to be more information literate than the teacher.  Nevertheless, there are undoubtedly many classrooms today where the teacher is doing more work than the students.  Here’s a start, consider the amount of work your students are doing and consider the work you are doing.
• Do you have “A” students who breeze through your course without putting out much effort?  Do you find those students put forth minimal effort required to achieve their A?  Do you have struggling students that you find hard to motivate?  A learner centered classroom is not described by one pace fits all.  Rather, a learner centered classroom is driven by improvement.  Students aren’t bound to rigid deadlines and rewards aren’t determined by grades nor are punishments determined by compliance.  To place a priority on improvement and learning, the teacher needs to communicate flexibility in deadlines, learning styles, pacing, home lives, and relationships.  Teachers in learner centered classrooms are likely leveraging technology to aide them in managing this new flexibility, especially when it comes to learning.  Do you allow retakes on your summative assessments?  It’s tough to prioritize improvement over grades if you aren’t willing to allow retakes on your assessments.  What would a second or third opportunity to demonstrate learning do for that student that you find hard to motivate?  Incorporate relentless feedback during that cycle and I’m confident you’ll have a student willing to try to improve his/her score rather than one disappointed again with a low grade.  Accept that zeroes do nothing but let that student off the hook.  If your assignment was important enough to design than it should be important enough for students to complete.  Placing a priority on learning means zeroes have no place in your classroom.  Zeroes belong in a teacher directed classroom, not one that is learner centered.
• Let your students lead.  Consider some menial tasks that you are carrying out during a typical week.  How many of those tasks could be completed by students?  Allow them to lead.  Paul Solarz writes in Learn Like A Pirate that allowing your students to interrupt the class at any time is one important aspect of a learner centered classroom.  Students will feel empowered when they understand their teacher is serious about allowing them to interrupt the classroom.  This obviously takes practice, flexibility, modeling, and constant feedback to direct appropriate interruptions and misdirect inappropriate interruptions.  Communicate early and often your system for allowing students to interrupt the class.
• If the only evidence of learning you have from your students is a letter on top of a test, quiz, assignment, etc. than you are likely driving too much of the learning and your students are likely forgetting a high percentage of what you’ve worked hard to teach.  A learner centered classroom means students are given the tools and opportunities to not only regurgitate their learning, but apply and create with their newly acquired knowledge.  Evidence of learning in a learner centered classroom comes in a variety of forms.  2015 presents classrooms with a buffet of choices for teachers and students to incorporate in their classroom as means to demonstrate our learning.  Students today are creating avatars that demonstrate learning, they are creating social media accounts of historical figures using Fakebook , they are producing instructional videos and uploading them to a global audience, they are blogging and documenting their learning through text and pictures, and they are using Minecraft to visually represent the acquired skill.  These are just a few drops in the bucket of ways that students are doing and creating with their learning.

If you’re like me, you have probably thought at one time, or perhaps you’re thinking it now: “this all sounds good, but it just wouldn’t work for my students” or “I like these ideas, but I’d be the only one trying it and it’s just not worth it.”  Imagine with me for a minute, what type of students our schools would be sending out post-high school if all classrooms were learner centered.  Imagine what the work force would be like if all teachers made it a priority to design classrooms where students felt comfortable to lead, felt comfortable documenting their learning in a variety of ways, viewed content as something that is readily available, but viewed application of that content as a necessary skill to survive today.  Imagine what content and skills would be retained if students stopped playing the game of school and started valuing growth and improvement over a grade.  I have already imagined it and that’s what convinced me to step out and try it.

I was intrigued when I read James R. Delisle’s commentary from Edweek, “Differentiation Doesn’t Work.”  As some of you may know, world renowned advocate for differentiation Carol Ann Tomlinson responded recently in her commentary “Differentiation Does, In Fact, Work.”  I’m in no position to argue either one of these commentaries but I do want to comment on some positions Ms Tomlinson takes in her response.

I’m an 8th grade math teacher in a middle school setting.  I was fortunate enough to have the backing of a previous administration that allowed the counselor and I to experiment with flexible grouping of students.  Our intention was to begin the school year with classes (45 min periods) of students grouped by similar strengths and weaknesses as determined by a number of considerations.  These groups weren’t meant to be static “tracks” but would allow the teacher to systematically design instruction that would target those weaknesses.  Once a student demonstrated he/she could perform at a level demonstrated at the sequential level, he/she was to be moved to the next class.  The grouping was to be very fluid.  Ms Tomlinson first stated that tracked or grouped classes, particularly the lower groups tend to be taught by newer or less experienced teachers using a curriculum that is far less robust than that used in upper tracks.  She states that the intellectual climate is dampened because students placed in lower groups consider themselves less able.  Ms Tomlinson points out some other frightening considerations of grouping students by ability, but I’ll allow you to read the article yourself.

My immediate response was that if Ms Tomlinson is accurately describing the environment in which grouping has traditionally taken place, shame on those leaders who allowed that to occur!  I can’t imagine that a shred of research would support a situation like that.  Flexible grouping, from my experience, is far different than what Ms Tomlinson described.  Particularly in a middle school setting, it’s much easier to allow the same teacher to instruct all the groups of students, rather than a new less experienced teacher instructing the low groups.  A tremendous amount of communication is required to keep the grouping flexible in nature and to ensure planning is accurately diagnosing and addressing student weaknesses.  I can’t imagine that being the case if different teachers are instructing different groups of students in an attempt to keep student schedules flexible.  Grouping or no grouping, it’s important that the classroom provide a robust and engaging curriculum.  No one would argue that.  In reference to the intellectual climate, I made a concerted effort to build a climate where the lower groups of students (you know, the ones who hated math, sat in the back to never utter a word, care less about turning in work on time or passing tests) knew immediately that Mr Oldfield was not going race through the curriculum with entire disregard to whether they were learning or not.  I communicated effectively that there would be no time limits on learning.  I appeared in my class one day as a “guest speaker”, Mr Brain Researcher, to share with my students the knowledge that all students are geniuses in one talent or another.  I most certainly kept my word that students would move up to a different class once they demonstrated they were ready.  The students in my lower classes still contact me occasionally and tell me that my math class was the only one where they actually learned something.  The students dropped all fear and inhibition at the door when they came to class.  I still exposed them to as much of the rich, authentic, technology-enhanced instruction as I did with other classes, I just made an attempt to identify where they were, communicate where they needed to go, and determine how we could all get there.

Don’t get me wrong, the system I attempted to implement was far from perfect.  Learning is chaotic.

The levels at which all students perform throughout the year needs to be monitored constantly.  Benchmarks for students to accomplish in order to move up need to be communicated often.  What I can say with full certainty is that my system looked nothing like the ones communicated by Ms Tomlinson and other commentaries blasting tracking students.  I believe it can be done in a manner that puts students first, eliminates any negative perceptions, and fills in the swiss-cheese gaps created by traditional k-12 math progression.

Having experienced both flexible grouping and very heterogenous groups of students in each period, I can’t go to the extreme that Mr Delisle takes on his position against differentiation.  I will say, for me and my position, it was easier to differentiate pace, planning, instruction, activities, and support for my students when they weren’t heterogeneously grouped within the same class period.  In fact, I feel myself failing more often than not in filling those swiss-cheese gaps this year because each class period presents such a wide variety of skill levels.  The struggle to differentiate is a constant fight for me, mostly in terms of time.  The time required of me to genuinely structure 5 different class periods each day in a way that maximizes engagement and support, and provides content-rich activities for each student is a real commitment.  This commitment is one that often makes me question where to focus my time: my family or my job.  I will continue to take Ms Tomlinson’s advice and incorporate low prep strategies as much as possible, while continuing to make progress in those areas she considers high prep.  I applaud Ms Tomlinson for her work and do consider her an irreplaceable resource for me and my class.