This week I’ve been thinking deeply about differentiation and the need to listen to my students. The video that follows below shows a former student of mine named Christine. I use this clip during professional development workshops to illustrate how the creative use of new tools has given me a powerful means to meet individual students’ needs and help them overcome serious barriers to success.
Christine had failed senior science twice before coming to the Learning Centre, but even though our program is individualised and she was taking an easier course, she was once again struggling. I kept trying to reassure her that she could do the work, but this was the last course that had to be completed before she graduated, time was getting short, and she was becoming more and more frozen. She had even begun to hyperventilate and experience panic attacks.
At about the same time that dropping out looked to Christine like the only way she’d be able to escape science, two other events occurred: the Phoenix successfully landed on Mars and Squidoo (about the least technical online program available for making websites) landed in on my digital desktop. The three events converged in that place of creative inspiration we all tap into as teachers and I came up with an idea that helped me rescue this drowning student. As she began to work on it, she even forgot to be afraid of science.
Christine is now working and happy in her new life after high school, but her plea for teachers to listen to our students still haunts me sometimes. Students want to do well but also carry a lot of fears. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. They don’t want to risk drawing the ire of the teacher or taunts of their peers. They don’t want to appear lacking in skill or understanding. As a result, by trying to do what they think the teacher wants, they miss out on getting their own needs met.
I regret that over 35 years of teaching that I left some students trapped in the isolation of silence because I didn’t tune in to their cues. When they were off task and behaving ‘badly’, too often I responded to the behaviour rather than stop and ask myself if it was a symptom of a learning deficit or long term frustration. Were they not learning because they were unmotivated or were they unmotivated because they weren’t learning?
Now, I try to counsel the students in my classes on the importance of being good consumers of education. I ask if they’d ever let a salesperson in a store persuade them to buy a garment that was not the right size. (They laugh at the thought.) Wouldn’t they’d ask ask the clerk to keep looking until he/she had found them what they need? (They nod.) I go on to say that not getting their needs met in a class is the same thing and that they must speak up in the same way to make sure their teacher is doing her job for them — meeting their needs and ensuring they end up understanding a skill or concept even if it takes many questions and requires a lot of time.
I haven’t always been very good at anticipating the assumptions students are making about learning priorities and acceptable responses. Now, with Christine’s words ringing in my ears whenever I make up a new activity or write a new unit study, I do my best to see it through Christine’s eyes. I ask myself if she would experience my lesson as a way to achieve breakthroughs and “walk around the circle” or whether it would trap her inside, hold her down, and make her hyperventilate again.
And so Christine, I have two things to say to you: first, I’m so sorry it took me so long to find a way to make education work for you, and also I’ve taken up your words to heart. I’m doing my best each day to remember that I’m not teaching skills, content, and subjects — I’m teaching people, and that I’m in the business of helping my students come to value learning as an act of empowerment — one that should help them too feel free.
[Postscript: For some reason when I began working this weekend, I oversaved the original piece on Christine. I've reconstructed it as best I can, but if you read the orignal this version may not seem quite the same. The original was lost in the Bermuda triangle of technology.]
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