Back to Normal Nightmares

Who would ever think that back to normal would be a nightmare? Let's run away from normal. It wasn't working. Pandemication in education just revealed stuff that was already wrong. The virus simply made it visible. 

Kylene Beers wholloped me with this statement many years ago: "Giving instructions isn't instruction." While I get in trouble for being a little salty and stepping on some toes - my own included - saying hard things...well they need to be said so we can do better. We are all doin' our darndest in the worst of situations: that's given and forgiven. But I think we have a window here into something that can help all of our learners. 

Last week at Abydos, I was confronted with a quote from Freire: "Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students." In my journal, I wrote this: 

Reminds me of something my momma says: "If momma ain't happy: ain't nobody happy." Taking Freire to heart, we could turn the phrase to "If the teacher ain't learning, ain't nobody learning." We can even go further to say, "If the students aren't teaching, then ain't nobody teaching."  

So, here comes the hard stuff. 

During pandemication education, many times we teachers told kids what to do. We gave them the steps in the lesson plan and assignments they were to complete. Read this. Answer that. Respond to these. Turn in all those. Now, normally, we would have been able to walk around the room to check for understanding and re'splain what kids weren't doing right or where they were moving off the mark. We could call the class back together and tell them all about how to fix it. Then we could send them off to get busy again. Until someone else asked the same silly question or we saw the same mess happening again. 

Let's not go back to that. Frankly, it should never have been normal. As I have been working with teachers (and grading reading academy artifacts), it's clear that an explicit model by and from the teacher about HOW we do our work isn't the same as telling kids WHAT to do or getting them involved in it before they really know what they're supposed to do and the quality of what it should look like and sound like. Hattie would call it teacher clarity, success criteria, and self-regulation. 

So what would this look like and sound like? My favorite prewriting activity is Blueprinting  from ACTS of Teaching by Carroll and Wilson. I made a little script about what that would look like as instructions and then as instruction. 

Instructions: You are going to draw a blueprint of a special place that will help you remember experiences that you can write about. First draw the floorplan of your house. Next, label the rooms. Now, on the bottom of the paper, start writing out things that happened in those places. You have five minutes, and then we will share. 

Instruction: Drawing a blueprint of a special place can help you remember experiences that you can write about. Let me show you a couple of was to do this. Sometimes, I draw out boxes of what my house would look like if I took the roof off. So, here's where my bedroom was. I begin to think about what was in the room and things I did in there. I'm going to jot that down on our thinking anchor chart so you can look at it for ideas later. Oh goodness, that was my closet. I just remembered about a time when my mom couldn't find my kitten. She asked me where it was. I had been keeping it in the closet so I could find her when I wanted to play. No wonder she ran away from me. I'm going to write cat in my closet down here at the bottom of the page before I forget. Another thing I can do is remember people that were in those rooms. Freddy, will you add that to our thinking chart while I tell you about what happened to David when we were playing with the box fan? 

Now you not only see into the top of my house but inside my mind. As a student, you would have a visible sample of what I wanted you to do and how I started thinking about the process of coming up with ideas to write about. You'd know what good work looked like and how to do it. And you'd be able to get started, knowing that you were doing it right. And then the teacher's work would change because instead of looking around to see if the kids were following the rules - the instructions, we could learn from what the students were thinking and give feedback to extend or promote their thinking. We'd all be teaching and learning. Let's make instruction normal and leave instructions for Ikea.