We may have developed all sorts of technological innovations—everything from cellphones to, in a few weeks, watches that run apps—but according to an English teacher from Maine, who won a $1 million prize for the quality of her teaching, the innovation with the greatest power for learning and setting students on a good path for their entire life, has been our teachers’ ability to give students plenty of choices and the time to work with the choices they make.
“In a writing-reading workshop,” Nancie Atwell writes on the Answer Sheet Blog for the Washington Post, “students choose the topics they write about and the books they read. Because they decide, they engage. Because they engage, they experience the volume of committed practice that leads to stamina and excellence.”
I invite you to read her entire essay on Valerie Strauss’s blog. What a remarkable observation, gained from more than 40 years of helping children become literate, empathy-filled adults who became lawyers, engineers, and pursued all other sorts of human endeavor, despite not being directed by their teachers into any one of them.
The teachers at Ms Atwell’s school gave their students some autonomy and, with it, the self-confidence to choose their own paths. Then, because they were given time to explore, discover, and often write about those choices, they developed qualities that last a lifetime.
Ethan Young, the high school student in Tennessee about whom we wrote last year as he delivered an eloquent speech before his local school board, made remarks hinting at the same path to academic excellence—not using Ms Atwell’s exact words but yielding the same take-home message. Mr Young said
Today we find ourselves in a nation that produces workers. Everything is career and college preparation. Somewhere our founding fathers are turning in their graves, pleading, screaming, and trying to say to us that we teach to free minds, we teach to inspire, we teach to equip. The careers will come naturally.
Again we say: let them learn. There’s no reason to teach in such a way that we’re trying to create little scientists or little lawyers or whatever career we happen to be pushing at the moment. Science is interesting on its own merits, as is the study of the law, of history, of literature. Kids will choose their own path, and with proper guidance, rather than college or test preparation all day every day, they’ll develop into the scientists, leaders, historians, artists, etc., we were hoping for all along.
Or, as Ms Atwell put it, “During my years in public schools, my students drew on their rich experiences as writers and readers, along with a few tactical practice sessions, to perform at least as well as kids who’d been test-prepped all year long, and usually much better.”
This has also been our consistent message on these pages. There is, with the PARCC exams in both Maryland and Illinois, some limited need for students to practice taking the test, especially if they’ll be doing it online. They need to know how to use the equation editor in math, for example, and how to drag and drop sentences to support a reading passage’s main idea into the little receiving boxes for the answer. That can be accomplished in a very short time, we wrote, without taking too much instructional time away from teachers and their students.