Category Archives: Education

Education

May Exams

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Inside, students are revising between exam papers, the common area full of laptops, notebooks, and nervous chatter.

Outside, trees that bloomed in early April only to have their blossoms freeze overnight fight for their lives, flowers and leaves black but still clinging.

Over lunch, we talked about the idea that as people live longer, childhood has extended. In many ways, this is a good thing: It is no longer expected for children to leave school and go off to work at 12 or 14, nor that everyone is partnered and married in their early 20s. In other ways, perhaps not such a good thing: An extension of childhood seems to have translated to less conformity to social norms, many of which have to do with respect for others. I believe social media is at fault here for creating alternate realities that fit each user. Why, I imagine a user thinking-without-thinking in the brief moments that the real world intrudes, should I have to fit myself into anything at all?

It’s May and our grade 12 exams have already begun, with grade 10 exams following next week. Some aspects of my students’ school experience still match mine from many years ago, but there are also ways my students learn that could not be more different. The fact that students, unprompted, refer to “learning how you learn” indicates that some shift has taken place.

Considering how much of our daily experiences in the world are curated for us – think about music recommendations, subscription-based news alerts, personal feeds, and explore pages – I think it’s worth noting that the school exam experience worldwide is very similar. All students who take exams from a certain exam board go through the same process. All schools are obligated to fulfill the same requirements. Everyone opens their results on the same day. As a student, I knew this to be the case, but it always thrilled me when, upon meeting new people, conversation turned to our experiences in classes and with teachers. I was surprised to learn how different our daily experiences were, only having encountered my own. And somehow, we all had ended up at the same place.

Through many years working with students, I have learned that it is not the work that I put into preparing them for exams, but rather the work that students put into preparing themselves that matters. I spend very little time these days, and sometimes none at all, going over course material; after all, students have spent two years on course content and have access to whatever they need to review. Rather, exam preparation in my classroom takes the form of prepared activities in which students are actively doing something and I wait to answer questions that arise. It might be easy to listen to a teacher talk, but the work is in the thinking, and my students understand that I am not going to do this part for them.

They understand, too, that exams are not a measure of their worth as a person, but rather a step that certain elements of society has decided is necessary in order to get them from point A to point B. One aspect of German society that I really like is that almost everyone does some sort of internship during secondary school, and that there are many vocational pathways of how to become a productive member of society; sitting exams that allow entrance to university is neither expected nor required. So when my students say, “But what if . . . ?” it’s easy to point to other options. In Germany, only about a third of people hold a university degree simply because it is not required for the vast majority of career possibilities.

Wherever young people end up and whatever they happen to do, I hope they are happy and fulfilled. I hope they chase the dreams that make them feel whole, and I hope they give themselves enough time to figure out what those dreams are. I hope they have opportunities to learn from success and failure, to stand tall after standing up again. And if they remember anything from their time in school, I hope it’s about the world around them, about appreciation of others, about what it means to be a good friend. They’ll figure out the rest as it comes.

Outside, the air deepens with the feeling that spring is, actually, here to stay this time.

Inside, students approach their tests with a mix of quiet confidence and anxiety, an understanding that they’ve spent two years learning and now need to prove it.

A former student came in for a chat the other day, and I smiled when she said she hardly thinks about high school anymore because it’s just not relevant. A year ago, she was one of the students waiting quietly with blue or black pens and sharpened pencils before taking her assigned seat in the exam rooms. What a difference a year makes.

Education

What I Learned from Action Research

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I started my graduate work in education the day after I accepted my undergraduate diploma, the day after my parents and I packed my school things into the car and I unpacked into my childhood bedroom. I spent that summer working my usual summer job, taking the first required courses of my Master’s degree, and applying for every teaching job that I could find. By the time summer ended and I had secured a teaching job for the fall, I was decidedly less enthusiastic about said degree and wasted little time in letting my advisor know. At the time, my coursework seemed too theoretical, too academic, too highbrow, and no match for the reality of being a new teacher. Balancing the time spent on teaching work and coursework meant that all other time ceased to exist, and I was in no state to actually learn much from the early stages of my degree. But I did, though I didn’t recognize it until much later.

In the second semester, at a time when I was decidedly more focused as a result of surviving the first months of teaching, one of our required assignments was a very traditional action research project. Action research has several theoretical frameworks, but the basic idea is that a teacher does research based on what is going on in a classroom and takes simultaneous action. Reflection is a key component of this process, and the hope is that transformative change will occur. Looking back, I don’t remember much of the paper I submitted, but the experience of doing action research indeed transformed the way I understood teaching and learning, a transformation that is a core component of my practice today. As a rule, I do not recommend being a first-year teacher when entering a graduate program, but I cannot deny that being a first-year teacher during my graduate program (and then a second-year teacher, which makes a remarkable difference) meant that I was malleable, enthusiastic, and highly motivated. This project caught me at a good time.

As it was, I was very lucky to be teaching a psychology elective course to grades 11 and 12 students. In the first semester of the school year, I taught one section and my department chair taught another, giving me someone to lean on. In the second semester, at the time of my action research project, I was having the wonderful experience of having taught something once and being able to revise it, a process I still very much enjoy. I was now the only teacher of this course, meaning I could really do whatever I wanted. Unlike the history courses I was also teaching, which culminated in state exams, this psychology course had no specific requirements aside from a broad set of standards. I was constantly trying to juggle the amount of information I felt responsible for giving my students in history (my approach to teaching and learning has changed dramatically in twelve years!) and psychology was a breath of fresh air. What if, I wanted to know, I took a step back and let my students lead?

For my project, my students and I divided up the psychology syllabus and students chose one topic for which they’d like to lead a discussion at the end of the unit. I don’t remember what the requirements were or what I expected students to hand in, but I do remember that it worked. I sat quietly in the back, taking notes as my students sat in a circle and went through the list of discussion questions their classmates had prepared. I remember one student who recorded herself having a conversation with someone about her topic, someone whose perspective she thought was missing, and playing it for her classmates before asking for their feedback. I remember my students really looking forward to each discussion, for the opportunity to share knowledge and draw conclusions. And I remember that the discussions got better over time, the students more prepared, the participants more involved. Ultimately, I concluded, my students didn’t need me to give them information. There was a whole lot they could find out and build and create on their own.

In terms of action research, I’d learned that a teacher can hand over to students and that this is an effective way to learn. A teacher creates the foundation, scaffolds, models, and supports, and this allows students to construct knowledge on their own. Beginning with this project, I began to understand the importance of both structure and flexibility, of the balance between time and resources. I learned that developing interpersonal skills is a part of learning and not an addition to it, and that mistakes and misconceptions are part of the learning process and not something to fear. I got used to saying, “I don’t know” in class and finding answers became a group activity.

As the world has changed, so has my approach to teaching and learning. This has also had to keep up with the way students have changed, and these changes have been dramatic. But at the end of the day, there is a lot that has remained the same. Learning is still a partnership and a process, and students need to know that they are critical partners in the process. Their devices know far more than I ever will, and my role is not to provide that information or to pretend I can keep up. Rather, my role is to raise young people who know how to work independently and together, who ask and answer difficult questions, and who see themselves as part of an interconnected community. I didn’t draw those connections in my action research project a dozen years ago, but I did learn that I could trust the young people who, for better or for worse, trusted me. And that has made all the difference.

Education

Teaching from the Heart

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Several years ago, sitting in the kitchen of a hostel in Interlaken, Switzerland on a rainy Christmas Eve, I was engrossed in a book that explained teaching as an emotionally demanding profession. Oh, I thought, well of course.

When I first started teaching, I remember thinking that my time with students was a bit like an improv show. You have a plan that is more of an outline because it needs enough flexibility for nothing to go according to plan. You’re working with diverse groups of students for a specific amount of time and each group is somewhat different and requires varying amounts of time on different activities, but you’re time-bound regardless. Whatever happened before the lesson may or may not be relevant to the tone in the room that day, and whatever is in store later may or may not make an appearance. You never know exactly who you’ll get or how they’ll respond, and if certain students are missing, the whole dynamic could change. So you need a plan that is clear enough to create a predictable environment and effectively use the time available, but you also need enough tools in your toolbox to be immediately flexible. You are always, and I mean always, thinking on your feet. Sounds like an improv show to me!

What makes teaching emotionally demanding is not only that you are constantly “reading the room” and responding accordingly, but that it is relentless. One class leaves and another enters, requiring a change of pace, change of style, change of content. A lesson might have gone poorly but there’s no space for the teacher’s emotion or sufficient reflection during that lesson, in which the teacher is likely trying to figure out what to change while simultaneously managing the current environment. Add to this that young people (any people) have a range of wants and needs that may or may not align with those of the whole class or of the teacher. If a student needs to talk in the five minutes of passing time between lessons during which the teacher thought they might be able to go to the washroom, the washroom will just have to wait.

And this does not even reflect the critical point that students need and deserve someone who is calm, collected, organized, and happy to see them, regardless of how the teacher might actually be feeling. Every interaction, even within the same lesson, should be a new interaction, which can be hard to do. After all, teachers are humans and have feelings even though they are not able to respond to them. Teachers can’t leave the room when a situation becomes stressful or unpleasant. They can’t take a breather to gather their thoughts and they can’t pivot to a different topic when they don’t know how to answer. They can’t pin failure on someone else, separate themselves from someone causing a problem, or attend to anything else that might be on their minds. This is what makes teaching emotionally demanding, and this is why I need quiet when I get home. And to sit down, just for five minutes, because I may not have sat down all day.

So it was a relief to read a book that described my daily experience, all the trials and the joy, the uncertainty and the real love that goes into what I do. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

Three very recent examples come to mind to illustrate what I mean.

Just the other day while on my bike, I found myself thinking of a particular student who I find emotionally demanding. Her moods are volatile and need to be managed very carefully (and it’s fortunate that she wears her heart on her sleeve), she is often deeply affected by any number of things, she fixates on minutiae, and it can be hard to approach her about the significant academic concerns that she is doing her best to avoid because of the high likelihood of setting her into a spiral. (And this is just one example of one student in one class.)

Yesterday this student asked if she could stay for a few minutes after school to talk about a personal issue. She wanted to talk to me because I teach psychology, she said. Years of questions framed exactly like this have led me to respond very cautiously and always with some trepidation. I do teach psychology, but I am not a psychologist. I am not a therapist, I am not a social worker, I am not trained to help anyone through crisis. Often the best I can do is refer the student to someone who can actually help them. But because I teach psychology, and perhaps because I listen, students think I know things and they come to talk.

As it turned out, and it took me greatly by surprise, this student wanted to talk about difficulties in communication with some of her relationships. She did not specify or provide any details, but explained that she is bothered by communication problems that certain people do not see the same way that she does. She wanted a right answer for how to proceed; she wanted affirmation that she was doing the right thing. We talked about communication styles and preferences, about respecting what people are telling us even when it’s not what we want to hear, and about setting boundaries. We didn’t find a right answer and she left, about 15 minutes later, clearly more comfortable with the idea that there isn’t a single answer, much less a right one.

Musing over this interaction last night, I found myself surprised that a student who is so reactive and volatile was quiet, thoughtful, and reflective when discussing a complex personal problem. She had insights I wouldn’t have expected and was intentionally discreet, showing a greater level of self-regulation that I had previously seen from her. The interaction allowed me to understand her differently, to see a different side of her, and this is perhaps something I can tap into the next time she’s having a rough day and brings that into class.

Teaching is comprised of dozens and dozens of relationships, all of which are enacted at once. And an emotionally demanding element of teaching is being the right person for each of those relationships, each and every time. After all, we are not equals and we are not peers. This is what I mean when I say that every interaction should be a new interaction. The student above should have my listening ear any time she asked for it, even on a day that had already been challenging.

Today, for example, after setting the rest of the class a task, I pulled two students out into the hall after asking them three times to change a behaviour. I had found what they were doing really frustrating and told them so. I am rarely upset in class, and can honestly only think of a couple of instances, but today I was and I could feel it through my whole body. It was an effort to keep my voice very quiet and very steady, and I could feel my elevated heart rate for several minutes after we all returned to class. I don’t know exactly why I was so bothered and it bears further thinking about, but I do know that I was very aware of how I behaved towards these students for the remainder of our lesson, and it took deliberate effort to act as though nothing had happened. Perhaps they felt the same, and it was perhaps as difficult for them to ask questions as it was for me to respond as clearly and gently as I normally do. But after the first “normal” interaction, the ice was broken, and the tension I felt diminished. When one of the students asked a second question, I knew we were alright and we carried on like before.

I can be upset at a behaviour, but this does not mean being upset at a young person learning to regulate their behaviour. When I took these students into the hall, I asked them to consider time and place and explained why this, our current context in class, was not it. Teaching is teaching, all the time, and we cannot expect students to know something if we haven’t made it very clear what it is we want them to know.

Considering what transpired between the end of the school day yesterday and the first lesson of the day today, I had to laugh when a student in my second lesson asked how I can always be so happy. I gave two answers and they’re equally true. First, I explained, what my students see comes with how I see my job as a teacher, regardless of how I might actually be feeling, and I acknowledged that there’s some level of performance in it. And second, I assured the students listening, I love what I do and am genuinely so glad to be able to do it.

My students looked a little distressed at the first answer and much happier about the second, but I think it’s good to have a bit of realism. Teachers are supposed to be teachers around students, and that largely means one thing. One very complex, multi-dimensional thing, but one thing. Teachers are not expected to be human because humanness would require us to acknowledge that complex, multi-dimensionality that we bring to the classroom as part of us and tuck away somewhere deep inside.

This is what I mean when I say that teaching is an emotionally demanding profession, and this is something I wish more people could appreciate. It’s more than lesson plans, more than marking papers, more than meeting with parents or sitting in faculty meetings. It’s more than working with students, writing letters of recommendation, and redoing unit planners. Teaching comes from the whole heart and I can think of no other way to do it.