Teaching outside the content

(this is question #2 of my annual report this year)

Question #2:

Choose one important concept or skill that you teach to your students, and describe how you go about teaching it.

Concept/ skill : Personal responsibility for independent and self-directed learning in open, honest partnership with teachers.

In my own professional transition from a small boarding school to a large day school, I have felt like I create more time and space in my classes at Punahou for study skills time and remediation than in the past. Of course, I am teaching several sections of Spanish 1 which represents students from across the academic board and has a higher concentration of students in the lower quartiles in terms of GPAs. So, this population has a greater need for support than the population that I taught at my other school.

I feel that I emphasize and work to teach students how to interact with honesty and transparency with each other, but more specifically with their teachers. I have more relaxed policies about homework assignments and grades than some of my colleagues. I let students know that if they contact me and alert me that they will be coming to class unprepared then I will give them extra time to complete an assignment. Also, I am flexible about when and how students take tests. If a student comes and talks to me about why they would do better if they took an assessment another time, I allow them to schedule a time to make it work best for them so that they can do the best work of which they are capable.

I built a Conference Day into the Spanish 1 schedule every couple or few cycles. On those days I would meet individually (or in small groups) with students to talk about their work, get a sense of their goals, and get a chance to know them a little better. It is an impossibility to meet with all my students outside of the class, so this was a great alternative for me. I try to emphasize personal responsibility and open and honest communication so that the students can take control of their learning.

While I know that I am not the only teacher being flexible or encouraging students to communicate honestly about their work loads, my sense is that there is a deeper and more pervasive culture which is a little more draconian about these things. I think, to some, that I am seen as an "easy" teacher for my stance on this. I think lack of flexibility and understanding about student's varied and complex situations outside of our own classrooms and unwillingness to address multiple intelligences, leads to a more pervasive culture of academic dishonesty. Why not just copy homework if you know that you will get a zero if you don't turn it in on time? How could you not be tempted to look at your classmate's answer on a quiz that you have to take even though you did not prepare as much as you would have liked?

Of course there is a line between coddling the students and teaching them to be responsible and comfortable advocating for themselves-- and often I wonder if I am getting it right. Colleagues often site the "real world" and talk about how students need to learn to accept failure and if we don't let them fail we are doing them a disservice later in life. I get that, to a point. Student failure is not something that I want to allow in my classroom. I want to give every student a chance to do their best and understand that they are working alongside of their teachers as they travel through their educational journey. That we, their teachers, are there to support their learning, not to restrict and limit their opportunities for success.