Working Smarter Not Harder

One of the great challenges of being a middle school teacher is knowing how much independence to give your students.  My school used to have a policy (an insane policy) where we would have to email missing homework assignments to any parent that requested it.  I had over seventy students, so that was a lot of email every Friday afternoon.  Most often, the emails had no result.  The students who did not do their homework before, still didn't do the homework with the reminder sent.  Students never learned how to organize on their own.  They were allowed to continue with their old habits.  Eventually my school dropped this policy and required parents to check the digital grading system, which had all the assignments anyway, but this example illustrates the importance of holding students accountable.

Teachers are often faced with the conundrum, "How much help is too much help?"  Teachers need to guide their students, but they cannot take on all of their responsibility.  Students must take on responsibility for their learning, and they must also learn how to think on their own.  Teachers need to stop making it easy for students.  The article "The Importance of Independent Learning" from the Brighter Thinking blog (found here), makes this point well.  The article argues that when teachers are working too hard, students are not working hard enough.  Students who are spoon fed information by their teachers never learn how to think on their own.  Peter Lucantoni states, "The real problem of course comes to the fore when learners move from a spoon-feeding context into one which expects learners to do things for themselves, to be inquisitive, to ask questions, and not to accept things at face value."  If teachers don't allow students to learn how to think and question, they will be unable to do so.  For example, if you can't apply math to real world situations, then knowing your multiplication tables is not very useful.

I took a class this summer about teaching literacy skills in all content areas.  It was a fascinating class, even though I am an English teacher.  The biggest gift was learning about inquiry-based instruction.  Inquiry-based instruction has the teacher give an overarching question that students must answer.  The teacher can provide instruction and reading materials, but at the end of the day, the students create the answer through their own work and discovery.  Students learn how to research, synthesize information, and defend their own thoughts and opinions.  The teacher does not provide all the answers.  Students will be successful if they are taught how to think and question on their own.

So the next time you are feeling overwhelmed with all your responsibilities, consider what you are asking your students to do.  Are they doing the right level of thinking?  Are we giving out the information without asking students to contribute anything at all?  Are they responsible for their learning?  If the answer is no, then we are not doing our students any favors.  We need to teach our kids to think, and thinking takes practice.