Speakout Columns
Is there still room in schools for thinking?
Apr 12, 2007 6:54 PM
Diana Senechal is a second-year teacher of ESL at IS 223 in Brooklyn, where she founded a musical drama club for English language learners. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale and has previously worked in fields as diverse as teaching, counseling, editing and computer programming.
If someone were to ask me, “Under what conditions would you continue to teach until retirement?” I would answer: “Under the condition that I have the opportunity to teach.”
I manage to teach, despite all the factors that make it difficult. Of these, the most pernicious to me is the anti-teaching culture: the dominant notion that students should be learning from one another, not from the teacher. While at my school the “workshop model” is not imposed rigidly, it affects us nonetheless, every day. Teachers receive messages from many sources that they should limit their instruction in scope and depth. Students understand intuitively that they need not pay much attention to the teacher since the teacher’s instructive role has diminished.
But the teacher’s duties have increased. Teachers are expected to keep articulation logs, incident logs, reading and writing conference logs and more. They must conduct standardized assessments as well as their own throughout the year. They must cover classes for absent teachers. They must patrol hallways and cafeterias. They must call parents. They must accommodate a wide range of levels in the classroom. They must be on their toes continually to prevent and break up fights. They must build their students’ portfolios, filling out forms and ensuring that nothing is missing (a formidable challenge when a student does little work). They must maintain a “technology-rich” environment even when the computers aren’t working. They must attend professional development seminars at the expense of self-initiated learning. In all this activity, the lesson and curriculum planning is often relegated to the late night hours.
I love lesson planning. I have guided my ESL students through a great variety of books and plays and I want to create activities that will help them understand the text or the concepts at a new level. I want to plan plays, songs, projects and games as well as challenging writing assignments. I want to consider the students and their responses.
Sadly, I never feel that I have enough time for that sort of lesson preparation. I do as much as I can but it feels like an extra frill, something I squeeze in because I care about it. Although teachers are expected to come equipped with lesson plans, only rarely does anyone mention depth of preparation. The process that we know as “teaching” has been pushed to the sidelines for most teachers, regardless of experience. Why?
The causes are numerous and complex. One could blame the workshop model; the wide range of levels in a given class; the breakdown of school discipline; the lack of alignment between instructional model, curriculum, and tests; the pressure to raise test scores; the overall anti-teacher climate; and more.
At the core, I see a movement away from individual thinking toward collaboration (or top-down mandates, as the case may be). Just as students are told to work in groups, so teachers must take part in “think-pair-share” and group activities, meeting after meeting, conference after conference, education course after education course. One drawback of “think-pair-share” is that there is never enough time allotted to the thinking portion. The topic is simplified accordingly so that not much thinking is needed.
I enjoy collaboration when it has substance; I deplore it when it stampedes thinking. Students and teachers are losing the practice of pondering a question on their own with minimal distraction. Has that sort of approach to learning been forgotten? In the meantime, if you want to keep some time for thinking you must be vigilant — and crafty. You must ignore all those voices that say something else must be done first. You must dare to make room for thought.
One day, maybe, when we recognize how thinking has suffered, we will turn around again. In professional development, teachers will study new subjects and analyze novels, historical documents, and philosophical tracts. They will develop curriculum units on rhetoric, ancient theater and poetics. They will bring back a math curriculum that makes sense. They will bring the arts back into the regular school day. They will deliver their lessons in the way that best suits the context, not in the way some consultant has told them to do it. They will create choruses, theater productions, discussion groups, special interest clubs and debating teams for students. Ancient and modern languages will be offered in all schools. Students will learn in depth about their own and other cultures. In short, thinking — based on knowledge — will reclaim its rightful place at the center of education.
Perhaps. It is also possible that that sort of thinking will be completely lost and future generations won’t know it. People who value thinking will steer away from the teaching profession. The Power Point presentation will replace the essay and we will all slide down a glossy chute to vacuous success.
The most likely possibility is that thinking will neither make a full comeback nor disappear entirely. Instead, it will linger on as an endangered phenomenon with teachers fighting for it against all odds.
I hope to be one of those teachers up to the end.
