During
my pre-student teaching this semester, one thing has been on my mind fairly
consistently: do these students actually
WANT to learn?
My
students come to class on a regular basis. They do their work. They participate
in activities. They behave appropriately (most of the time). When I pose a
question to them, they usually come up with a satisfactory answer. However,
when I ask them to ASK questions, to engage in discussion about things that THEY
want to talk about, it seems they have no idea where to start. Is this because
they actually don’t care about learning? Are they only here to earn a grade?
I am sure you have heard that old saying “curiosity killed the cat.” How about, “children
should be seen and not heard.” Follow directions. Complete the assignment so
you can get a good grade and graduate. I suppose this attitude could work for
high school if your only goal is to graduate, but what happens after? Like, in
real life? Do you just stop learning? Do you just go to college doing the exact
same thing—going through the motions to get the grade? Learning is about being
curious, asking questions, getting rowdy, solving real problems, and taking a
stand. Learning is exciting! What is more thrilling than the process of asking
a question and finding the answer? Or even better than that, asking a question
that has NO answer? Being left to speculate! To invent! To theorize! How can I show my students how amazing
learning can be?
Perhaps
this “get the job done” attitude has been taught to students when they were in
lower grades. Maybe it is caused by parents/guardians/teachers/mentors putting too
much emphasis on grades, and not enough emphasis on learning. I can’t change
what has already happened, but I can try to change how my students feel about
education now.
I
heard an NPR special on All Things
Considered called “Building a Better
Teacher: Dissecting America’s Education Culture.” You can listen to the
podcast at http://www.npr.org/2014/08/09/338831269/building-a-better-teacher-dissecting-americas-education-culture.
In the podcast, they discuss the differences in Japan’s educational system and
education in the United States. According to Elizabeth Green, the U.S. is great
at coming up with new and improved teaching strategies, but not so great at implementing
them. Green says that when she visited Japanese schools she was surprised at
how noisy the classrooms were. She expected to find a quiet, traditional
environment, but instead she found that the lessons were very interactive. Another
difference is the amount of information students are asked to focus on in a
single lesson. Green uses a math class as an example: in the US, a single math
class may go through 15-30 problems, whereas in Japan, they do one problem a
day.
Green
says that in Japan, teaching is considered a public science. Teachers,
administrators, and social scientists attend real classrooms regularly to
watch, dissect, and analyze lessons. They consistently use this data to improve
education, and emphasize training teachers in new techniques. From what I can
tell, education in Japan is all about collaboration, questioning, and building
upon prior information to continually create a better system to educate our
youth.
You
may be asking yourself what this “Building a Better Teacher” stuff has to do
with my original question: how to get students to want to learn.
This
is the answer: improving students’
attitudes toward learning begins with building better teachers.
The
stuff that we want our students to do on a regular basis (questioning,
collaboration, intentional and authentic learning) are the things that we,
educators, should be doing all the time as well. We should always be learning;
not just about how to be a better teacher, but about everything! We should be
learning things at school and outside of business hours to bring back to the classroom--
learn from our students; learn from our colleagues; learn from watching movies;
learn from listening to the radio; learn from reading books; learn from
watching Netflix; learn from traveling; learn from random internet queries; learn
from talking to people at a coffee shop.
If
we can show our students how thrilling it can be to acquire knowledge in real
life, and inspire them to do the same…just imagine a classroom full of
questioning, curious kids…aching, craving, begging for answers to their
deepest, most desperate questions. Right now it seems like a fantasy, but I
believe it is possible. We have to change the mindset of our students, and I
believe this starts by changing the mindset of teachers.
