Stop Instructing All Your Students: Student-choice and Instruction

I remember the first time I watched a recorded lesson of my own teaching. While I was teaching, I thought I was nailing it. I was a student-teacher, so to feel good about a lesson was sort of this new concept to me at the time. Then I watched the video.

There I was, walking around the front of the classroom of 40 students (thank you, Beaverton, for the class sizes of 2012-13) while waving a sticky note attached to my finger like it was my teaching sigil on a banner and I was the overenthusiastic flag-bearer. The front row was actively engaged. Not to toot my own horn, but most of the class was engaged. It was sort of fun to watch their heads follow me as I let out my nervous student-teacher energy by essentially making laps around the classroom.

However, the camera was set up in the back corner of the room. I wanted to make sure I could see everything, and see everything I did. Directly in front of the camera were two students: one had his head on his desk almost the entire time, and the other student was playing on his phone under the desk. This happened for almost the entire 20-minute lesson.

Thankfully the sleeping student wasn't this obvious.
Source: http://www.dumpaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/student-is-tired-sleeping-in-class.jpg

Despite the number of students engaged in my lesson, I didn't teach the whole class. I'm sure there were other students I didn't notice who weren't engaged.

After watching the video, I began pouring myself into engagement strategies. I mapped my walking areas to identify where I wasn't using proximity to engage students. I focused on shortening my lecture time and including more breaks for students to talk. I used name-calling sticks, questioning strategies, pair-shares, backchannel chats, etc. I was trying every trick in the book, but no matter what I did, I couldn't engage everyone. It was maddening and hopeless.

If I could go back to that moment and talk to my former self, I would tell them this: give up. Stop trying to teach all your students.

Hold on. Hold on. Don't jump to conclusions yet. I'm not saying that I shouldn't hold every student accountable for learning. What I'm saying is that the premise of putting 30 students in a room together, a number of whom don't really want to be there; asking them to pay attention to me talk for an extended period of time on a topic that not every student will see as necessary to their learning; and expecting every student to get the same thing out of it, despite the fact that my classroom includes a ridiculously varied level of student readiness – the premise that I can do that is inherently flawed.

This concept is where the flipped and blended lessons were born. It was a different approach, a way to try to address this issue. It was a way to give students information when they were ready for it. I love flipped and blended learning. I think it gives us the opportunity to do many of the things we couldn't do before: reteach in a timely fashion, address absenteeism in new ways, adapt our instruction to the digital age, etc.

Nonetheless, I want to take it a step further, and we're going to delve into differentiation here, but instead of focusing on the differentiation of assessment or product, I want to talk about the differentiation of instruction. Most of the differentiation we do with instruction is based on student-readiness; it is the differentiation of the content or level. In doing this, we often overlook the format or method of delivery of the content.

Here's what I'm proposing: (1) Make your lessons optional by allowing students to choose if they want to attend your lectures. (2) Provide/allow students to pursue different avenues of learning depending on their own personality and learning style.

To make your lessons optional, students must see the personal value of the lesson. If you don't help them identify their current level of understanding and how the lesson would benefit them, you'll never have students attend your lessons. However, you can help students understand the value of a lesson in a few ways:

1. Give students a pre-assessment that is clearly and expressly connected to the standards covered in the unit. Until students understand where they're at and what they need to learn, they won't care about learning it.
2. Identify important lessons with your students. Let students know (a) what the standards are and ask them what they will need to learn to be successful in each standard, (b) what the product or project is and discuss what skills students will need to complete the product or project, and (c) ask students what else they think would be valuable to learn in the unit or section of the curriculum. To be clear, this involves asking students what they need. You aren't changing the standards; you're just seeing how students want to approach them. 
3. Develop alternative routes to the content of your lessons. If students don't want to attend your lesson, how else could they learn the content? Could you develop a flipped lesson? What about a webquest activity? What if student could just curate a ranked list of the five best YouTube videos on the content with justification for their rankings? All of these, for certain students, could be much more valuable than attending the lecture. 
4. Have students schedule their days. Yeah, I mean that. Stop planning out the students' every move. If you have a sixty-minute class period, have students schedule their week in twenty-minute blocks. I know that I'm much more committed to a schedule I set than a schedule someone sets for me. This will allow students to sign up for your lesson, spend more time on a project that they are passionate about, schedule some one-on-one time with you, etc. This allows students to identify what a valuable use of their time would be instead of just telling them what should be valuable.

The key behind all of this is that students must have a clear understanding of what the expectations of learning are for the course and/or unit. If students don't understand either what is expected of their learning, where they're at in their learning, or why they are learning it, this won't work. The foundation is intrinsic motivation, and that must begin at a very, very foundational level of purpose and direction. 

However, picture a classroom that looks like this: 

Step 1: When you start a new unit, you go over the standards for the unit. Once you do that, you and the class brainstorm what lessons would be valuable in helping people be successful with those standards. Then, you explain the expectations for the project or product, and then you repeat the process of brainstorming lessons students would find helpful. Lastly, let students throw out other lessons they think would be valuable. Before moving on, it could be really helpful to have students vote on the lessons. If enough people think it would be valuable, you plan it. This avoids the dilemma of having too many lessons or having a lesson that only one person is interested in.

Step 2: You give the students a pre-assessment over the standards, and then – most importantly – the students review and analyze their results. They need to identify areas of weakness to see learning as valuable. If a student already knows the content or aced a section of the pre-assessment, then they can skip the lesson later on.

Step 3: Once the lessons have been identified and the students know their strengths and weakness, you can plan out the different routes for that lesson. Develop your lessons, some flipped lessons, and maybe some webquest or self-paced learning activities. I would strongly recommend that you don't do this on your own. This is where a PLC could be incredibly handy. As a group, tackle this together. Break into groups and plan the different forms of the lesson.

Step 4: Your students plan out their weeks. You can post a schedule of the lessons, and students can sign up for them. If they don't want to watch your lesson, they could sign up for another form of the content delivery. If they already mastered the content, they could just schedule in extra time to develop their project, or even – heaven forbid – we give them time to pursue something they're passionate about.

Step 5: You assess your students repeatedly, re-plan lessons, adjust, and WORK TOGETHER. To often, especially in whole-group lessons, it feels like and "us vs. them" scenario, like we're trying to convince them to do something they want to do. It's frustrating for everyone in the room. It can feel ineffective, and sometimes it really is. 

I'm not proposing that you go out and overhaul your unit today. I'm not even proposing that you try to shift your classroom to this method in the middle of this year. (I say that partially because I'm trying to do that with one of my classes right now, and it's really tough to do.) 

What I'm hoping you'll do after reading this is think, mull it over. Maybe start planning a unit for next year that looks like this. Get a group together of teachers interested in trying this and research. 

I am typically a proponent of the tech industry's motto of "work fast and break things," but in this case I would very much encourage you to do the opposite. 

This isn't a small shift. This is an upheaval of the entire structure of how we typically run our classrooms. It can be messy, it can be difficult, and it can be terrifying to approach. 

What valuable change is anything other than that, though?