Lifelong Learners
Show don't tell
You’re a teacher. You’re arguing about the bathroom with Jimmy, again. You’re reminding Johnny that a negative times a negative is a positive for the fiftieth time.
Don’t you wish there was something more?
One of my more banal but also deeply held opinions is that knowing things is good. Education exists to teach people stuff, and teaching people stuff is worthwhile. Of course, school can’t teach people everything they might need to know. So we want students to become lifelong learners, to enjoy learning things, to seek out new knowledge, and to believe they are capable learners.
Another deeply held opinion of mine is that schools often do a pretty bad job of creating lifelong learners. It’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, but the actions that cause people to be lifelong learners often feel fuzzy. It often feels like schools are trying to convince students that learning is worthwhile. “Here’s why you need to write five paragraph essays. Here’s where you’ll use this idea in the Real World™.”
Show don’t tell is good advice here. Don’t convince students learning is worthwhile, show them. These are the moments when a student finally nails a set of integer subtraction problems, or finds the surface area of a square pyramid from start to finish. They feel proud. They feel accomplished. The momentum motivates them to want to learn something else.
Unfortunately, unsuccessful learning does the opposite. The frustration of never being able to remember something, or constantly being asked to read a text or solve a problem that feels out of reach.
The reality is, there are millions of kids who go to school every day and are asked to do things they don’t know how to do. They feel dumb. When they put effort in they often feel like that effort doesn’t do any good. They learn, gradually, over time, that they aren’t very good at learning. That isn’t an immutable truth. It’s a product of their schooling: they fall behind, they slip through the cracks, and the issues compound over time. Maybe they struggle through and earn a diploma, maybe not. Regardless, the main lesson they learn from school is that they aren’t very good at learning.
If there’s one thing that keeps me up at night it’s this: I teach a lot of students who don’t think they can learn. I try to move the needle for as many as I can, but I’m not as successful as I’d like to be. I have limited time, limited energy. I make hard choices about who can make the most of any extra help I have to offer. I orient my planning and teaching toward the students who struggle the most. But it’s never enough, and I watch some students continue down a path where they don’t believe in themselves.
I’ve written before that I think school is good. I’m not in favor of reinventing education or tearing down the system. Schools aren’t perfect, but we’re asked to do an enormous job and I think the basic design of school is the best idea we’ve had. But if there is one reason I would consider a substantial redesign of the school system, it would be this: students who are falling behind, who feel dumb every day, who don’t believe that they can learn, should be a five-alarm fire, and schools should be willing to drop everything and try to change that trajectory.
YES! YES! YES!
I completely agree with what you've written! I also think that students feel "dumb" more in math class compared to other subjects, because there is an impression of math as being a more "objective" subject than others... Some students feel that that there is only one correct answer and one correct method for every concept/problem and if you can't solve it (in your head) in the fastest way possible, you are "dumb." To compound this pervasive impression, some *teachers* teach in such a way to reinforce this perception by not celebrating different ways to reach a solution because it's not the conventional method, because it's a more inefficient method, or because the math teacher themselves don't understand why/how it works. When I was teaching 9th grade Algebra 1 students, I always felt that one of my biggest responsibilities was to turn my students' self-doubt into self-confidence, so that they could actually be open to learning in their remaining years in school.
That being said, I do have one worry - when the main conversation in a school becomes primarily about "helping students believe that they can learn" (i.e. when that becomes the focus of school-wide PD), I often find that it starts to skew towards *just* supporting students' social emotional health, and not about examining the structural and long-term changes that may need to happen in the school. For example, changes may be made to include discussions about growth mindset in each class or helping students combat negative self-talk or maybe techniques are taught for time management or creating SMART goals, etc. etc.. But rarely is that conversation expanded to include discussions about the need for a more vertically aligned math curriculum or critical examination of how we support students who don't have the prior knowledge to be successful in the current math classes. (Or other equivalent conversations for other subjects.)
In other words, I think that in order for schools to become spaces where we can help nurture students who believe they are "capable" learners, the time spent on understanding, building, and collaborating on the curriculum (i.e. the background stuff that doesn't seem as "student-facing") needs to be seen as valuable as discussing seemingly more immediate in-class issues. This is probably why more affluent schools where teachers have the time and mind-space to fully engage in these curricular discussions are often in a virtuous cycle of being able to nurture and benefit from inquisitive learners, as opposed to schools where teacher may often have to wear a gazillion other hats *in addition to* being just a teacher. (I say this as somebody who went from teaching in an inner-city public school to a very affluent private school. I think I was already a good teacher, in terms of being able to connect with students and helping them feel seen and valued... but I definitely became a much better *math* teacher and thus able to help students feel explicitly more successful in *math* once I didn't have to be everything for everyone all the time.)