FAITH IN AND RESPECT FOR YOUNG LEARNERS
|
Love for Teaching I love teaching and believe it is my calling. I feel privileged to work with adolescents to help them grow and mature, discover their unique gifts, and become skillful and capable learners. Being able to help students brings me great satisfaction. It is an endeavor that is always new, ever challenging, and provides infinite possibilities for creativity and my own growth. Offering my program of study to home school families begins a new phase in my career. I am excited about the possibilities and the freedom it will give me to refine further my teaching tools and offer my skills to new families. I think it is important for families to understand this is how I feel about teaching and working with young learners. Faith in and Respect for Young Learners Of all of the observations that others have made about my teaching, these are some that have meant the most to me:
I greatly value these words from former students, parents, and colleagues because they make me feel like I have been understood, that they have discovered the wellspring from which everything I do as a teacher flows. I only do what I do as a teacher because I have great faith in young learners and great respect for their capabilities. This has made me an unconventional teacher who teaches in an unconventional way in order to help students reach the heights I know they can achieve. By the sixth or seventh grade level, students should be competent in the fundamentals of reading and writing and have matured physically and mentally to point where they have the intellectual capacity to start to reason like adults. I believe that they are ready to be introduced to the adult tools for learning they need for success in the higher levels of schooling and life, such as critical thinking and analytical skills, close reading, and essay writing. Combating Low Expectations However, these adult tools for learning are seldom developed in middle and high school programs. Often, they are given little priority or done in a cursory way that lacks the time and energy needed for them to be seriously developed. Why is this the case? I think it is because many educational programs underestimate both the students’ capabilities and the power of education to transform their lives; they set a low bar for student achievement and for what education can do to advance their development. They seem to lack educational vision for what both their students and their programs of study can be. It also seems to me as if educators are at a loss about what higher level skills to teach in the humanities after the basics of reading and writing are taught by later elementary school. This may relate to the simple fact that most educators were not well trained in higher order skills themselves and do not know how to develop them in their students. In my own education up to the master’s degree level, I never received any training in critical thinking or even essay writing; I had to figure these things out myself. Another reason why higher order skills are little taught may be that they are hard to develop. It is far easier to focus learning on subject matter content and its memorization that can be assessed with a simple test. Developing student reading, writing, and reasoning is a much more challenging endeavor. I could continue with a litany of reasons, but the fact remains that few academic programs dedicate themselves to the challenging work of advancing the higher order skills of close reading, essay writing, and critical thinking needed for success. Developing the Skills for Success in the Adult World I contend that the middle and early high school years are the right time to introduce students to the power tools for learning. They are intellectually ready, and the sooner they begin to work on developing these challenging skills, the easier the rest of their academic lives will be. Their road ahead will be far smoother if they understand what the game of intellectual inquiry is and how it is played, and are able to wield skillfully its major tools. My program is designed to take up the challenging task of developing these core skills and to make it the first priority of what we do. Beyond a doubt, the students in my classes will learn interesting subject matter content about significant topics that will add to their understanding of the world. However, my main goal is to develop their ability to employ the adult tools for learning. I have a proven track record of doing this, as you can read in testimonials on this website and in two unsolicited emails I received from former seventh grade students many years after leaving my class:
This is the kind of impact I have had on students by having faith in their abilities and having a vision for education that believes in and knows how to empower young learners. Developing Skills through High Standards and Rigorous Undertakings Developing the adult tools of learning is not easy and takes considerable time and effort. Why? Because they are higher order skills, skills that are not easy to describe or for which you can quickly paint a clear and simple target that learners will comprehend. How do you teach someone to read between the lines to pick up an author’s subtle meanings, to write with clarity and precision, or to thinking critically and deeply to find ideas of significance? A big part of my job in the early months of the school year is simply helping young learners to see where the target is and what it looks like. Understanding what the goal is in soccer or archery is a much easier undertaking. Helping students to understand the distinctions that make for better or worse answers to questions of reasoned judgment is a trickier, subtler endeavor. Yet, it can be done, little by little, with middle school and high school students, and doing this hard work will have a great impact on their learning going forward. Setting powerful skills for learning as my ultimate goals ensures my program has high standards that require considerable practice and effort to achieve. No one can jump on a bike for the first time and ride; no one can pick up a tennis racket and play effectively. Skill development is slow and gradual, and requires a lot of feedback from your coaches and energetic practice followed by more practice. This is how my classroom operates. I have never had a student who did not feel challenged in my classroom, and believe me, I have had the privilege of working with some brilliant young people in my career. The projects I design and the material we tackle require vigorous effort to be successful. Our readings have depth and complexity and will stretch the readers’ abilities; our analytical tasks demand focused and prolonged concentration to be successful; our writing assignments set high bars to educate the reader clearly and completely about the topic under consideration. In our intellectual gym, we use the metaphor for how muscle is built. If you lift tiny little weights, you will grow muscle in tiny amounts. If you lift big weights, you will challenge your muscles beyond what they can do and stimulate big growth. I set a high bar for my students so they will grow to the sky; I feel that this is my job as their intellectual coach, and this is the kind of teacher I want to be, because this is the kind of impact I want to have on your child. I am setting out to change your child’s life forever. I have big goals for your child and big goals for myself. Success for All Learners Another benefit of emphasizing the development of the key processes and skills of learning is that it helps all learners, the gifted and those with learning differences alike. At the Foundation for Critical Thinking’s International Conference some years ago, an educator asked me a pointed question. She said that I worked at an elite private school and might be able to teach critical thinking to these children, but how could she possibly teach it to her less privileged students. After assuring her that the children in my independent school classroom ranged from the gifted to those with significant learning issues, I noted that the tools of critical thinking and effective reading and writing I teach my students benefited all of my learners. In fact, it has been my experience that they might benefit to an even greater degree my students with learning challenges. I am centered on providing my students with concrete tools and methods for developing their core reading, writing, and thinking skills. When learning writing, we explore how to build an excellent analytical or expository paragraph and emphasize that it is like building a structure that needs a set of specific parts to be strong and stand up. We learn the explicit components of these paragraphs and the logic behind each piece and how they all work together to form an integrated whole. This kind of detailed focus on understanding the logic and structure to build an excellent paragraph provides methods that benefit students with learning differences as well as the gifted. Some of the greatest successes of my career have been to help students with learning differences experience solid growth and greater confidence in their abilities. My class also challenges students of high ability and provides them with rigorous intellectual tasks. Like teaching the skills of basketball or cooking, there are ever-finer subtleties to master. I can continually advance the bar to the next level higher for your child, or I can keep it at the height it needs to be for him or her to gain confidence at their present level. Focusing on skill development along side the body of content ensures that students will be challenged at the point where they are and that there will always be higher levels for them to achieve. |