The Future’s So Bright We Have to Wear Shades
By Richard A. Robinson, PhD, Hackley English Department Chair
A student revising an essay exasperatedly demands, “Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do instead of asking me questions?” He doesn’t yet appreciate that his teacher will not “tell him” because she knows 1) that he will internalize little from answers she hands to him, 2) that there is no single solution to the concerns she raises in her questions, 3) that her student must discover the solution that works best for him as a writer, 4) that he will grow most by working through her questions and learning what he needs to do to make himself understood, and 5) that she targets her feedback to help him. In short, like most Hackley teachers, she teaches her student to analyze his work and to decide what he needs to do to improve. This aspect of a Hackley education actually begins in our lower school with such work as the second-grade science research project. And in our middle school it has been a few years since students began setting goals with support from their teachers and leading their own conferences with their parents. Gone are the days when Hackley “masters” simply wrote corrections in “the boys’” marbled composition notebooks and the boys dutifully replicated those corrections.
At Hackley and elsewhere, education continues to evolve, and in July I was fortunate enough to be one of five Hackley teachers who attended “Deeper Learning for All” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education: Keshena Richardson, Melissa Boviero, Seth Karpinski, Krista Dudley, and me. It was an opportunity for us to think deeply about the future of education at Hackley and to do so with others engaged in shaping the future of education at their schools. Before attending, we surveyed a number of Hackley educators about what we valued and we found we thought much alike. Indeed, once at Harvard, we immediately saw that while the participants came from all over the world, we all shared a vision of a future in which educators deliberately design experiences to empower students to think for themselves and to take ownership of their learning. To help make these ideas less abstract, I shall talk about how some of them play out in the English classroom — like the anecdote with which I opened.
We agreed that to teach students to take ownership of their learning, we must give them spaces in which to take risks and fail safely. Only then can we enable them both to build on success and to look dispassionately at — and learn from — failure. They should emulate Thomas Edison, who said of his earlier attempts to invent a usable incandescent light bulb, “I haven’t failed; I’ve just found 10,000 that won’t work.” Or they should say, “I haven’t failed, I simply have not done ______ yet.” Educators call such an attitude “a growth-mindset,” and we try to promote it. For English teachers, safe spaces for creative thinking comprise class discussion, multi-class round table discussions, analytical class presentations, group work, role-play gaming, and a variety of prewriting and drafting tasks including discussion board posts and blogs. There, in a low-stakes environment, students can try out the most improbable ideas, risk failure, seek feedback, assess themselves, and grow. We particularly need such spaces in 2019 because anxieties around college admissions discourage students from thinking divergently and going beyond the predictable. We also need such spaces because convergent thinking produced the host of problems our students will need to solve as adults.
We agreed that a model of education based on the idea of covering as much of a subject as possible tends to produce superficial understanding of many things, and that a deeper dive into fewer topics increases the likelihood that students learn the skills and key habits of minds of certain kinds of work. For English this change is easy to grasp: we have backed away from whirlwind survey courses purporting to cover an entire culture in a year, and we have embraced courses covering a number of carefully-selected texts on which we spend more time and thought. The essays generated in these courses evolve over time through many low-stakes writing tasks, drafts, and revisions, so that those essays reflect thoughtful and carefully-developed ideas.
We agreed that students learn best through activities anchored in the real-world so that those activities are both memorable and useful. As more than one educator put it, we must show students that what they learn has continuity with the world so that the last day of class is not the last day they think about it. For English teachers, this means not only that we should provide texts that speak to students’ experiences and relate to the world around them, but also that we should teach students to discover such connections so that no text remains silent to them. When an English teacher invites students to relate Thomas Pynchon’s 1964 novel The Crying of Lot 49 to an “out-of-text space,” he supports them in pursuing topics of personal interest to find something in their world that makes a story from a half century ago relevant. Some such students surely will connect events of 2019 with the protagonist’s discovery that many are cut off from the American dream because of race, gender, sexual orientation, and national origin. Such students will draw on current events, political commentary, movies, and music focused on social justice to interpret the novel, and they will also to use the novel to think about their world. For English teachers, this also means that when we seek texts, we must strive to seek texts that serve our diverse community as mirrors and windows — books in which students can see themselves and see others depicted as well.
Eleventh grade students teaching writing skills to third graders.
As what I say immediately above implies, we agreed that to anchor learning in the real world, we must respect our students out-of-school-interests as part of who they are and teach them to draw upon the knowledge and skills those interests teach them as intellectual resources to exploit in making discoveries for themselves.
We agreed that we need not only to encourage students to work confidently and independently, but also to work collaboratively to develop and complete projects. Indeed, we agreed that collaborative projects prepare students for the sort of real-world efforts they will be called upon to perform as members of creative teams in many fields.
We agreed that we need to give students more rich, interdisciplinary experiences — including lessons, activities, projects, and trips both domestic and overseas — to support them in finding or creating connections among ideas they are learning in various courses in many disciplines and to encourage them to think beyond the silos of traditional curricula. Such experiences expose students to multiple ways of thinking about the world and challenge their preconceptions and habits of mind. The possibilities here for us to think out of the box are truly fantastic: year-long projects for classes, like our current fifth-grade memoir; service-learning projects and courses; elective majors designed in response to faculty and student interest; and the current project in which eleventh-grade English students teach writing skills to third graders.
Finally, we agreed that by focusing on real-world concerns and topics that are relevant to our students, we not only improve their education, but we also increase the chances that they become lifelong learners who continue to develop new skills and abilities to face an ever-changing world.
Every day, I find — and I learn from the educators around me — new and better ways to apply these ideas, and I am delighted to work at a school where we’ve so thoroughly begun to embrace what the future of education holds.