Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine conclude their 2019 analysis of what IS working in small pockets in American education with a list of 8 stances of “deeper learning” teacher versus traditional teachers. The first one is their stance toward the goal of education. While traditional teachers see it as to “cover the material,” deeper learning teachers teachers see it as to “[d]o the work of the field; inspire students to become members of the field” (350). A related phrase they use is “playing the whole game at the junior level” (In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School).
I’m reminded of my love affair with sports which began in 4th grade. At my new school, the 4th and 5th grade boys spent all recess every recess playing basketball. I was fascinated. It looked much more fun than 4-square or monkey bars, which I was familiar with. This shouting and running, this heat and action, this celebration and frustration, this mixture of patterns and improvisation fascinated me. I was totally new to the sport. Sure, I knew my dad watched it on TV sometimes, but that meant nothing to me. Now I sat on the sidelines enthralled, at first utterly mystified why someone would shout “double dribble!” or “traveling!” and all play would stop while an argument ensued. Gradually I began to deduce the rules. My whole body yearned to join in, but I just knew I’d be rejected as both a girl and a total neophyte. Finally the day came that a teacher noticed the devotion of my vigil. “Do you want to play?” she asked. I nodded. “Won’t they let you?” Skipping the part about how I’d never even asked, I shook my head. The boys got an undeserved scolding, and I was in.
That was the day that lead years later to a partial basketball scholarship to a small Christian college. A lot of other stuff, of course, happened in between. First the mocking calls of the other team, “Throw it to the female!” since that would lead to a turnover. There were the hours of shooting and dribbling by myself between the time the rest of the students went home and the time my mom, a teacher, was ready to leave. Eventually there was being the only 10th grader to make the varsity team in another new school.
Along the way, I did my share of drills, shooting, conditioning, weight-lifting, and studying of playbooks. I did those things not for the love of doing them, but for the love of playing the game. And whether I was playing it on the elementary school playground, on the middle school team, or at the Long Beach Arena in the high school area divisional championship, playing the whole game at the junior level also drove me back to the study and practice that would raise that game even further.
Imagine if that first elementary playground supervisor had told me, “Well, here’s a rulebook, and you can practice over there, and if you work hard, in 12 years you might be a basketball player.” Nope—I was a basketball player from the first moment I stepped on that asphalt court with a bunch of 4th and 5th grade boys. I was an unskilled and clueless basketball player—but I was one. I adopted the attitudes and behaviors of a basketball player: being on the court every spare moment, running like crazy up and down the court, requesting a basketball for Christmas, carrying that basketball back and forth to school in my bicycle.
What does "the whole game at a junior level" look like in English? It looks like having a "big idea," real world purpose or essential question for reading and writing, and then scaffolding that reading and writing so students can increasingly take ownership for uncovering and communicating meaning. They discuss their observations and questions in small groups, because we're smarter together than alone. Sometimes they point out things I had not yet discovered. Sometimes I share my writing with them. My goal is not to have my students master a body of knowledge about the particular works we study, but to take on the identities of readers and writers as they read those works and write about related ideas. To become competent, confident, motivated independent readers and writers. Parts of speech, metaphors, paragraph transitions, and canonical writers are studied as means to this end. Not as prerequisites so that in some undefined future they can become readers and writers, but as they do the actual work of reading and writing. Because I want them to feel the joy and challenge that I felt on that elementary basketball court, that I feel as I read and write now, doing the work of my field.
What is the work of your field—the actual “game" practitioners play? How do you induct your students into that work? How do they play “the whole game at the junior level”?
No comments:
Post a Comment