The Hard Questions, Part 1

I started this post intending to have five questions in it, but I realized that each one has been so meaningful to me that I can't pack all my thoughts for each one into a manageable post. As such, I'm going to break the questions up into a few different posts. 

Over the course of my career, there have been a few times where someone asks a questions, and it just dumbfounds me. The coolest part is that so often these questions have been incredibly simple, but what they've done is stripped away all the extra stuff surrounding my day-to-day experience with teaching and forced me to look at the heart of what I do in the classroom with my students.

Without wasting any time, let's get to those questions:

1. What am I doing that justifies having this group of students in a physical location at a set time?
2. If my students weren't required to come, would they be here?
3. Would I want to do the work I am assigning my students?
4. What does this student need?
5. What is my vision of my ideal classroom?

I'll address the first two in this post. The rest will come later.

Question 1: What am I doing that justifies having this group of students in a physical location at a set time?

This was probably the one that I ran across most recently that stopped me in my tracks. The reason it hit me so hard is that is so succinctly forced me to grapple with the reality of the digital age and the implications that has for the classroom. Can my answer be that I'm delivering content? Nope, that can happen anytime and anyplace these days, whether that's YouTube, Khan Academy, online articles, etc. Well, could my answer be assessing students? Maybe, but can't they also do that anytime and anyplace? 

Is this to say that we shouldn't be delivering content or providing assessment opportunities in class? No, there is a reality that can't be avoided. However, it does help me reorient my perspective so that I realize that those things aren't the most important things I can be doing in the classroom. 

Instead, what if our answer to that question was something like, "I'm providing students opportunities to identify their passions and pursue them in a meaningful way," "I'm helping students learn how to teach themselves," or "I'm providing students opportunities to build interpersonal and leadership skills." 

What it really comes down to is that the modern student doesn't need guidance in gathering information; what they need is guidance in developing the skills that they can use to build their futures.

Question 2: If my students weren't required to come, would they be here?

Full disclosure: sometimes I have to avoid this question. There are definitely days where I have to admit to my students that class is going to be pretty boring. So often we rely too heavily on attendance and truancy systems to get students to school. What if all that and the rules went away? 

This isn't to say that the answer to this question is engagement and enjoyment. I actually have come to resent the way engagement has been approached in the classroom. Too often it's a surface-level approach where teachers create fun and exciting activities that basically just entertain students. 

The problem with a focus on engagement is that it often operates on the fallacy that we can make the classroom more fun than the activities students engage in outside the classroom. We will never make school as fun as a video game, as entertaining as a new TV show, or as dopamine-inducing as social media; and to try is to waste time and energy on a fruitless endeavor – but we can make school a lot more meaningful, and that's what really matters.

While a draconian, Snape's-potions-class-like environment definitely isn't the goal, the opposite focus of having a really fun class shouldn't be the goal either. Does it help students want to be there? Sure, but the problem is that the instant it isn't fun anymore, students lose interest in it. When we deal in a currency of fun, we're doomed. 

So, if fun isn't the answer, what is? 

You aren't going to like the real answer because it requires a lot more sustained work than just making a Kahoot. At it's foundation, the answer is human connection. Students want to go places where they feel valued, cared about, and part of a community. For that to happen, the classroom culture has to be built every single day. Students are way more apt to show up to a class where they know people are waiting for them to be there than they are for a class that plays lots of games. 

This questions forces me to take a step back from what we do in the classroom and focus on how students feel in the classroom. If I can create an environment in my classroom where every single student feels like their presence is valued and necessary for the class to function well, I won't need an attendance system to ensure students come to school. 

There's another element to this question, but it butts into the next question. For the rest of the response to this question, you'll have to check out part two in this series.

Final Thought: In looking back over what I've written about these first two questions, I realized that both of them boil down to the same thing: education isn't where students go to get content anymore; it's where they go to grow as people.