Part two: From good to great without getting noses out of joint!
This is the second of a two-part series.
By adapting the management theory of Jim Collins in Good to Great and Philip Lundin in Fish a classroom culture can be provided that gives freedom for both teachers and students to be on the leading edge of teaching and learning.
Making their day
Making their day is all about creating energy and good will. Rapport between teacher and student generates emotional energy which is then applied to the teaching and learning. After 3 boys my wife and I produced a daughter. At the time I was teaching a class of very lively 14-year-old girls. After the daughter’s birth I walked into the classroom to find that almost every girl had written congratulations and initialled it on the chalkboard. In a square in the middle some bright spark had written, is this the start of three girls. Quietly I picked up a piece of yellow chalk and wrote in large letters NO. Before I could turn back to the class a loud voice said, “Of course not he’s far too old,” and much laughter followed. Eventually I got my own back when it came to report writing time when I put on her report, “She lacks mature judgement i.e. she thinks I’m a geriatric.”
A sense of humour can be an important ingredient of making their day.
So too is the use of song. It can be an original rap or it can simply be new words to an old tune. Thus the Habits of Mind can be introduced and remembered by composing a simple song to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain. Here are the first two verses as composed with the assistance of my two granddaughters aged fourteen and sixteen. Half way through the writing they sent me an email, “This is fun!” It is the doing it differently – the unique nature of the task – that makes the day fun for them.
“There are sixteen useful habits in our kit, There are sixteen useful habits in our kit, There are sixteen useful habits, there are sixteen useful habits, there are sixteen useful habits in our kit. There is empathy in listening in our kit, There is empathy in listening in our kit, There is empathy in listening, there is empathy in listening, There is empathy in listening in our kit.”
The modular nature: the modular effect of this resource engine is well shown by how well the rituals and routines of the school fit making their day. It is all too easy to have a gap between what is espoused and what is practiced. A simple every day ritual such as lining up for class shows this.
I was recently doing some work in a school where the students line up outside the door. They know the ritual so they wait silently, hoping they are not going to be reprimanded for the line not being straight enough, or because someone has chosen to tempt fate and whisper a comment. They wait patiently, perhaps resignedly. The teacher gives the signal and they rush to enter the classroom. Chatter breaks out getting louder and louder as they sweep through the door, slightly jostling each other in the process. The teacher claps her hands. The students clap back and silence reigns. The teacher has ownership and the lesson begins. There is a tension present born of fear doing something wrong. To the untrained eye it looks like good discipline. In reality it is doing to. The teacher is using a transactional leadership style where conforming is the norm. The lessons begin in an atmosphere that may at best be neutral, at worst negative, and unlikely to be positive. The teacher is in control. The students lack both control and power. Yet the school claims to be catering for the individual!
At my school there is no lining up in the corridor. Students chatter quietly as they filter into the classroom. They know the required ritual and are comfortable with it. Some may linger at a desk to finish a conversation before they sit at their own desk, purposefully and positively take out a book and start reading. Within a few minutes of entering the room all is quiet, purposeful. It is condition go! There is a sense of relaxed alertness. The teacher is using a transformational leadership style. After a period of quiet the teacher calls for attention and the lesson begins within an atmosphere of positiveness. The students have internal control. They are responsible. They have ownership.
Another way of making their day or not making their day is in the questioning ritual that is in vogue in the school and the classroom. Quite simply students are neutralised or empowered by the ritual used for questioning.
Students not being called on to answer questions all too often develop a low level of confidence believing that you the teacher do not believe they are capable of answering, or at least that others will have a better answer. They may even believe that the problem is that you the teacher do not like them. All this negative expectancy too easily becomes an alibi for inattention and beyond that ill discipline. Who gets asked to answer the questions becomes the arbiter of success or failure. Therefore, to make their day some form of random selection of who gets to answer the questions is required.
Wait time is the other important ritual when asking questions. Unless some specific attention is given to it, most teachers require immediate answers, and beyond a one second wait if an answer has not already been forthcoming either answer the question themselves or pose another question. Mary Budd Rowe’s research shows that by waiting
just 3 seconds before requiring a response a positive mindset is developed with the students then able to be fully engaged.
Thus fifteen months after introducing both the wait time and random selection of students into a school as the school wide ritual for questions and answers a teacher volunteers that the quieter boys are now stirred to answer with a quality response. Another teacher states, “I now have a class of keen ‘answerers’, they tell me by their eyes.”
Another teacher raised to the overall consciousness level what is involved when she explained to her class that once she had asked the question she would count down from 25 under her breath as wait time. One day when she asked for a speedy reply one student said “Boy you must have skip counted down that time Mrs Donaldson.” Rapport between student and teacher develops when the students know what is going on and why.
By involving everyone, not just the favoured few, in the questioning and answering, the teacher is making their day and learning flows.
Being there
Being there is all about taking an individual interest in each student. Recently I conducted a qualitative survey asking a group of 5 year olds to 17 year olds to state simple the one thing that they thought made a good teacher. Heading the list was that the good teacher was interested in them as individuals, or a variation on that that the good teacher was interested in students as people. Two other important aspects also appeared – that the teacher engaged them, and that there was interaction or doing with not doing too.
I also asked what the characteristics of a bad teacher were and not surprisingly the opposites to the above appeared. One heartfelt comment being, “After two weeks of a lesson a day he still didn’t know my name – maybe trivial but to me infuriating and almost insulting.”
The doing with needed to be a working relationship where there is mutual respect and self discipline. One scathing comment about a disliked teacher was how she wanted to be “everyone’s friend, and never sanctioned anyone.” That attitude led to disaster.
Flowing easily from the above is formative assessment with the teacher cruising the room giving focused feedback. Where this doesn’t happen disaster follows.
Cate had to produce a poster for the visual language assessment for her course. Despite the teacher spending time and effort painstakingly placing exemplary examples from previously successful students about the classroom walls as models, Cate did not produce a poster. Her reason was that she did not know what to do.
Naturally the teacher was incensed. She was proud of the exemplars she had painstakingly collected and displayed in an attractive manner on the wall. She felt she had done her bit and more. Cate was not just poor mouthed within the faculty lounge but in class by both word and body language. To further inflame the situation, Cate produced an almost perfect poster for her ICT teacher only a few weeks later. If it had been presented in the English class, it would have gained at least a merit. It was very good indeed.
Integral to this is the realisation that learning is individual – that students learn in many different ways, and teaching and learning is most efficient when these differences are taken into account. The Dunn and Dunn learning styles model is complex, having 21 different categories. However, there is a smaller subset of the whole, where learners are divided into global big picture learners who just want the general idea, and analytic learners who need heaps of structure and detail. It is this sub-set that explained Cate, and it provided a simple enough solution to her problem of not knowing what to do. Rather than being disinterested in learning, and disinterested in completing the poster Cate was anxious to get it right and so to know exactly what she had to do was a prerequisite for her to get started.
Quite simply Cate was a learner who needed a lot of structure. Although the teacher had gone to considerable trouble to put her exemplars up on the wall, this was big picture stuff, and what Cate needed was the detail built up step by step in sequence to the extent of having a visual to guide her. We explored this and she chattered away comfortably and openly. She now had the detail she needed to be relaxed and confident.
Such graphics also provide for a visual learning style. The next question followed from that. “You’re having no problem talking to me and you don’t even know me, surely you could have asked the teacher.”
Immediately the weather changed. Suddenly there was tenseness in her body and a scowl on her face. “I don’t like the teacher!” While I was not surprised by this the vehemence with which it was said indicated a deep emotional response.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because every time I ask her a question, she answers to the whole class!” So that was it. The teacher was answering in an authoritarian way. This so alienated the quiet but very articulate introvert that I was so easily chatting with, that she chose to remain silent and fail rather than be humiliated by her teacher.
That was not so in her ICT class. When I asked how she had developed such a good poster she said that her teacher had helped her. How I wanted to know.
Again the weather changed, her whole body lost any tenseness that it had retained and her whole face lit up. “She’s lovely,” Cate said. “When I ask her a question she comes and sits beside me just like you are and we chat about all the little bits and where they fit in. She’s lovely!”
So there was the answer. Not only was the ICT teacher a collegial adult but she also quietly through conversation provided the detailed structure that Cate needed to complete her poster. The emotional blocks had been removed by teaching to Cate’s learning style. She was being there for Cate.
This true story shows up how important the emotional climate or culture in the class is. For this student one climate produces an emotional response that empowers the student’s natural learning system, the other literally shut it down. To complicate matters not all students are like Cate. According to Learning Style theory and practice there are the analytics like Cate who need step by step detail to succeed, and also like Cate, those whose sociological preference is for a collegial relationship. However, there are also their opposites. Some, the globals, simply want the big picture like the completed posters the teacher had on the wall as a general guide. This then lets them get on with doing it their way.
This is where teacher imagination is needed to cater for many styles without becoming stressed out.
“My way or the highway” is very often the philosophy of schools and teachers and so an adverse culture flourishes. This means that the school, the classroom, the total learning environment is teacher friendly rather than student/user friendly. In their book Jonathan Mooney and David Cole (2000) Dyslexic and ADHD students respectively, who went on to achieve honours degrees, ram this home, when they state, “It did not matter that we showed strong alternative learning style…. these strengths were ignored … Attempts at intervention allowed people to blame us… It took us 15 years… to stop blaming ourselves….and to come to realize how profound an effect the environment had had on our ability to succeed.”
The school is the sea. The students are the fish. If the sea is not kept at the right temperature the fish will die!