Students are fighters. Students are leaders. Students are doers. Students are thinkers. Students are compassionate. Students are workers. Students are professional. Students study the game. I could go on forever. Of course, when we prescribe individual characteristics to students we can think of any number of ways to describe them. When we try and formulate a definition or a single statement about what a student is, that task proves to be much more difficult. We can start with the normal descriptions that typify dialogue about students within and outside of the field of education. Students are kids who go to school to receive a “well-rounded” education. Within this traditional school setting students learn skills, knowledge, manners, proper behavior, develop relationships, and have access to mentors, teachers, and coaches who help them on the path to adulthood.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer. I’ll go to the dictionary for help. According to Merriam-Webster a student (with listed synonyms as “learner” and “scholar”) is simply “one who attends school.” Dictionary.com defines a student as, “a person formally engaged in learning, especially one enrolled in a school or college; pupil.” Sticking with the theme, Google lists the top definition of a student as, “a person who is studying at a school or college.” The Oxford English Dictionary states that a student is “A person studying at a university or other place of higher education.” All of these definitions share the characteristics of the traditional view of the student. Functional, but not inspiring.
Yet, I am intrigued by the additional definition of this word and the one that Oxford actually states as the primary definition of a student as, “a person engaged in or dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, esp. in a particular subject area.” (Meriam-Webster, Google, and Dictionary.com listed a version of this as a secondary definition) This is more to my liking. This version of the word represents a clear diversion from the traditional and bland way students are defined. It is this version of the word that I’d like to explore in this post.
As I stated in my first post on this blog, teachers are leaders and masters. One essential component of this philosophy is my belief that students should do the work of professionals or masters in their given subject. Again, students should be athletes in P.E., historians in history, and mathematicians in math. This philosophy complements the definition of a student as a “pursuer of knowledge.” After all, true masters and leaders are always looking for the next great discovery and breakthrough. As Stephen Pressfield, when talking about the legendary golfer Tiger Woods, quotes in his brilliant book, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, “The student of the game knows that the levels of revelation that can unfold in golf, as in any art, are inexhaustible.” Essentially, a student understands that the real pursuit of knowledge is a lifelong process.
This begs the question of how do we get students to become dedicated pursuers of knowledge and embark on this process. From the student’s perspective, there are some fundamental barriers that we must first address and overcome. “What if I’m not interested in this subject?” “What if I don’t like the teacher?” “How can I possibly do the work of a master historian?” “Why are all of our assignments difficult?” As a teacher, I also run into some key roadblocks that hold back students from pursuing this work. Some students may never have taken a class specifically devoted to the kinds of skills that are required in my subject. They may express their lack of interest in my subject which is reflected in comments like “This class is boring and I don’t learn anything that will affect my life in the future.” My students may not be at the reading and writing level that is a prerequisite of my subject. They may lack basic knowledge about my subject which is necessary and makes deeper learning more accessible. Some learning may simply be above the level of my students for a whole host of factors such as age, cognitive ability, intelligence, time constraints, lack of scaffolding, accommodations or modifications, and/or existent learning disabilities.
With all these potential barriers in mind, how do we do it? How do we get students to do the work necessary for deeper learning? More to the point, how do we turn “our students are humans who go to school” (i.e., pupils) into “our students are humans who voluntarily embark on the pursuit of knowledge” (i.e., learners)? There are a myriad of ways we can do this.
First, we need to meet students where they are. This is a point that I have to remind myself of constantly. One of the marks of an inexperienced or ineffective teacher is shooting high, yet not truly assessing the students’ background knowledge and skills. To know how to get where one wants to go, one must first take stock of where they are. At worst, this assessment of background knowledge should take place before each learning unit, at best before each lesson. Once the teacher understands the prior knowledge of their students, they can take the necessary steps to provide a standard baseline from which deeper learning can be accessed.
Basketball provides us with an easy analogy. Unless it is an exceptional group, most 4th graders probably don’t understand the concept of a 1-3-1 trap zone. For non-basketball nerds, a 1-3-1 trap zone is an aggressive defensive formation that involves trapping one offensive player when they receive a pass beyond the half-court line with 2 defenders who are “guarding” certain areas of the court, instead of simply guarding one player at a time. If I were the coach, before I can teach the players the proper execution of the zone defense, I need to make sure they understand basic defensive principles such as communication, effort, and positional awareness. Before I can do that, I should make sure that the players understand the simple concept of guarding one “man.” I should teach them how to move their feet in the most effective way when their opponent has the ball, how to position themselves when their opponent doesn’t have the ball, and how to position their body in the most effective way to stop their opponent from receiving the ball. If I don’t address the basics of defense, I shouldn’t get upset when my team fails to execute a more complicated formation.
Once I have established the background knowledge for all students, I can now set them up for the journey. Before I do this, I must show students why the journey they are embarking on is important to them. This can be extremely difficult, yet is paramount for the success of any learning activity. The modern student is surrounded by environmental factors that reinforce superficiality. Poor diets, social media, video games, and other causes of overstimulation are creating students who require a clear idea of where they will arrive after embarking on the journey. Without this vision, students can easily lose interest, become defeated, or lack the motivation required to push through difficult tasks. How do we give them a vision?
At a practical level, I can show them that learning “destinations” can take the form of any number of project-based deliverables that are not the typical summative test. These include student-made videos, podcasts, books, portfolios, models, cartoons, interviews, blogs, tweets, vlogs, reports, experiments, designs, or proposals. Showing students examples from previous years is a simple and effective way to both stir their imagination and give them an answer to the “why” questions that we teachers are so often presented with from students. It is not enough to simply tell students to think bigger and aim higher, but today’s students especially need a clear vision for where they are going.
At a cognitive level, I need to show students that what I am teaching them goes beyond the classroom and impacts their lives on a day-to-day basis. There are 4 levels of experience from which I can draw on to help show them that what I’m teaching them really does matter. On the most basic level I can appeal to my students’ senses. How does my subject connect to what I am currently seeing, smelling, touching, tasting, hearing, feeling? Appealing to senses can ground students because it shows them how my subject is connected to the most basic of human experiences.
Second, I can show students how my subject connects with their environments. By environments, I can mean immediate physical space, their natural environments, and their social environments and social groups. I can ask questions like, “Where am I,” Who’s here with me,” “What am I doing,” What’s going on around me at this moment?” These questions stimulate the senses and are a precursor to metacognition, as they ask the student to actively consider what they are noticing and experiencing.
Third, we can expand out into the broader context of their lives. We connect students with their communities, countries, regions, and their world. In doing so, we are now showing students the interplay between the vast number of experiences taking place at one time. This kind of thinking links well with learning activities that ask students to make connections between seemingly different contexts. In turn, students are now able to see the broader perspective and begin to understand the crucial idea that small, day-to-day experiences do not always happen randomly. When students internalize that what they see is not always is what is (“there is more than meets the eye”), they start forming their own essential questions, a precursor to the pursuit of knowledge that will help them answer those essential questions.
The final piece that makes our subjects relevant to students comes from the question that all students want to ask. It is the central relevance question: “How will this help me in the future?” There are practical and I would argue superficial ways that teachers make answer this question. We can say it will be on the test at the end of the unit or semester. We can say if they don’t learn this, it will impact their future grades. The truth is, we don’t and can’t know the answer to this question. We cannot know what general knowledge or skills will be needed in the future. So how do we respond? I believe that teachers can answer this question by going backwards; going to the past. When a student says they want to be an athlete or an astronaut when they grow up, it’s because they have convinced themselves of the associated benefits of that profession in relation to what they believe they are good at or interested in. The students may be thinking about the monetary or status benefits. They may be thinking about the internal benefits of doing something they love everyday. They may be thinking about the social benefits that a certain profession might give them. Whatever they are thinking about, they are tieing their future experiences to their experiences in the past. As these experiences change, so too does the vision of their future.
Because we cannot give students a perfect answer to the future question, we can draw on their background knowledge as a way to convince them that what they are learning now may help them in the future. For example, a student may take for granted and may be able to easily answer why they learned basic mathematic computation. For example, they’ll use it when they are calculating the potential price of items in the school cafeteria to make sure that they have enough money. Of course this is an easy example, yet when more complicated knowledge and skills are being taught it does become more difficult to convince students that they what they are learning is relevant. The key is to consistently draw upon student’s past experiences and to make visible the knowledge they have acquired to demonstrate that what is learned know can be of use in the future.
We cannot turn all our students into the Oxford version of a student in our subject. We cannot make all of our students love math the same way they love history, or the same way they love science or music, or drama, or language. Yet, if we as teachers commit to the idea that our job is to give students the tools to pursue knowledge, rather than the knowledge itself then we have successfully molded our students into lifelong learners. We have transformed them from pupils, and turned them into explorers. When they become explorers, they inevitably become students.
Tony Teaches 