What do you want your students to understand today in this lesson? It was a simple enough question. Wasn’t it? And yet, having asked it many times to many teachers, I realized that it wasn’t simple at all. It was daunting. It was humbling. It produced deer-in-the-headlights’ responses.
Like most teachers, I was clear on the types of skills that I was expected to teach; I understood what my students should be able to do. But to understand? Now, this was the million dollar question.
Before educational specialists and publishers coined the term learning targets (statements designed to clarify daily learning), I was using them to guide my lesson planning because my teaching mentors had used them. In the 1970s, my best teachers were clear about what they expected their students to know and to do. They didn’t post these targets on the board (chalk, not white board). They didn’t have fancy wall charts with special boxes to showcase them. But each day, they taught purposefully with these targets in mind. Early on, I saw the difference that such clear-headed lesson design made in my own learning. And I wanted to emulate this in my own classrooms.
Years later, as I attempted to help other teachers identify both what they wanted their students to know and to do, I became painfully aware that I was asking many to enter foreign territory. What do you mean “to know”? I want them to answer the questions at the end of the chapter. or I want them to takes notes today. Sadly, our skill-driven era had blinded many to the reality that doing alone was not enough.
Sadder still was the reality that teachers and administrators were eagerly checking off skills on lists created to ensure that they were meeting state and/or federal regulations. Identifying main idea? Check. Citing evidence? Check. With horror, I witnessed how such check-lists gave educators the false assurance that all was well.
As a consultant, I once visited with a group of teachers who were explaining how they measured their students’ mastery of the skills identified in our state standards. I asked how they determined proficiency in students who cited evidence to support a main idea, one of many Iowa educational standards. They explained that if their students cited evidence from a text, they met this standard. I smiled politely. Here was living proof that the check-list was alive and well. It didn’t seem to matter if their students cited the wrong or weak evidence. They just had to cite something, and they were proficient. These students didn’t need to deeply understand the idea they were supporting or that there were passages in the text that supported it much better than others. They didn’t need to know this because their teachers measured success by doing rather than by knowing.
In all good conscience, I can’t really condemn such efforts, for I know that they were well-intended, at best, and compliant, at least. Most teachers in the educational trenches are simply good foot soldiers. Even if they are confused or disgusted by what initiatives and guidelines come their way, in the end, they dutifully give their best.
I can, however, condemn those who all too willingly push the educational pendulum from one side to the other, leaving time-tested practices and philosophies in their wake. These are the folk who literally throw the baby out with the bathwater. Skills are in, everything else is out. Forget what you learned professionally last year–or ever! If you care about your students, you will change!
Certainly, change can be necessary and good. But change for the sake of change hurts us all. I have lived too long in the educational world not to notice that about every 7-8 years, text book companies roll out new editions. Which schools are persuaded to buy because they are new and different, because they are much better than the previous editions, because they are more closely aligned with current guidelines and include the latest educational research, etc. In this world, change is often about money and little more. And companies who have embraced the skills’ market are cashing in.
The majority of the professional work I’ve done in the past 10 years is to help teachers create concept-based units that intentionally marry skills with ideas. In a nutshell, I’m in the forest and the trees business these days. When teachers are lost in the undergrowth of discrete skills, I throw them lifelines. Together, we work to identify the ideas worth learning. Then, and only then, do we work to achieve this end by choosing the best and most relevant skills. And we do all of this in hopes that students will be able to see the forest for the trees, that they will come to see how skills are a means to an end: to learn the kinds of ideas that have lived–and continue to live–beyond a single lesson, text, or unit.
This is the legacy I hope to have left for my students: that they will remember the big, enduring ideas from the best thinkers. Like those from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who taught me that one’s intellect must always be balanced with one’s heart. Or from Ernest Hemingway who helped me see the heroism in grace under pressure. I want them to remember lessons learned from history rather than to recall specific dates and names of battles. I want them to have drawn well-considered conclusions after they have considered opposing views rather than to proudly admit they’ve mastered a particular skill.
And this is the legacy that I hope I can help other teachers leave to their students. Undoubtedly the educational pendulum will swing again for the next generation of students. But for this generation, we have an obligation to do much more than teach skills.
Martial artist Bruce Lee claims that training is one of the most neglected phases of athletics. Too much time is given to the development of skill and too little to the development of the individual . . . We would do well to take these words to heart in our schools, as well. When we spend too much time on developing skills, we have too little, if any, time to spend on developing individuals, which has always required a strong foundation of ideas.
And so, I’ll continue my forest and trees work. It’s a good fight, perhaps one of the only fights worth fighting these days, and I’m in it for the long haul.
