Kids with Differences- Part 2 Challenges

In this episode I talk about differences as challenges-  both for student and for us in our teaching.  This is part 2.  In the next episode I will talk about differences as opportunities for our kids and for our teaching.

From this episode: 

Many of us might shy away from making our teaching about something personal, something that matters a lot to us.  Think about the teachers that you admire, what about them makes you remember them long after you were their student?  The ones I remember were fully there with what they were teaching, not as a responsibility, but as a passion, a need to share their deep care for the subject with others.   What we love and care about is particular to us and makes us unique and different.  As much as we should embrace the differences students bring to their learning, we need to embrace and live our differences, our gifts in our teaching.  We teach best when we teach what we love.

Transcript

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Hi everybody, this is Johnny. Last time I talked about kids' differences as problems and much about the problem of differences being made by how we organize our schools and grade levels. I want to move us beyond differences as problems. Differences as problems makes it too easy to step away from our responsibility to teach the kids we have. Think about how many talks with teacher colleagues are about those kids, those kids who can't or won't learn like the others. Those conversations often just end with it is what it is. There's not much we can do for those kids, and all teachers have that problem. Let's take a different stand. Let's take differences as a challenge. I will start with differences as a challenge for our students. Imagine being that kid who knows that reading is coming up and that it will be just hard, not knowing what it is about reading that is hard for you, but you just don't get it like the other kids do. You can't put a name on it, but you are different from the others when it comes to reading. What do you do? You could do your best with what's in front of you, try to decode, try to use context clues, but plainly struggle while doing so. You might be resourceful while you read, getting help from your peers, your friends as a way to compensate, as a way to get through the text, having them help you through the text. You do all of this. You use your good strategies, you get help from your friends, and still you're not a good reader. So you start to avoid reading. Try to make your struggle invisible. Keep face, making sure that your teacher and just as importantly, your peers don't see you as less able as different. All of this is an incredible amount of work. So much of it is kept hidden personal. Being different is a hard challenge for kids. They work so hard to compensate for their difference, so hard to mask their difference. Difference is a challenge for their teachers as well, expect that we are plainly aware of the compensations and maskings our kids take on to manage their differences. Being aware is not the end of our responsibility, it is a start. The first challenge is to set ourselves up to notice and understand the differences our students bring with them into our classrooms. We come to our work with expectations about how kids are supposed to be students, how they should carry themselves, present themselves in school. It's when they don't do the student thing well that we notice. I want to set out a challenge for us. Maybe instead of starting with student qualities, we start with looking for the interesting human qualities in each kid, the ones that make each kid who they are, unique and different. Starting from this place should move us to understand that differences are normal. We are all different in interesting ways from one another. Some of those differences might make us more able, a talent or positive attribute, some of those differences might make us less able, a limitation, or a disability. We all have some mix of these, none of us is made of all good or all bad. It is in the context we find ourselves that these differences benefit us or hinder us. On a playing field or in a concert hall, or in a science lab, or on a dance floor, our differences make us more or less capable. School as it is is a context where differences make some more capable and others less so. School values some ways of being and doing over other ways. Reading well, writing well, speaking well are all positive virtues in a classroom. So are sitting still, talking when aloud, and doing what the teacher tells you to do. When you are a kid who doesn't do any of these well because of some inherent or chosen difference, then you are not doing school as a student should. Those same differences in another context, not sitting still as an athlete, talking with friends as a social person, not doing what you are told as an artist, are virtues in those contexts. So a second challenge for us. How might we reimagine our classrooms as spaces built for learning and for differences? How do we change the context of school so differences move from problems to something expected, and maybe even embraced? Many of you have taken on principles from UDL or Universal Design for Learning into your teaching. This framework starts from the stance that the differences kids bring to their learning are a natural and expected part of what makes up a classroom. UDL sets out three considerations for these differences. The first is how a teacher sets out what is to be learned. Much of traditional teaching relies on telling, talking out loud and kids listening to what we say. UDL pushes teachers to more fully involve other modalities of attention. Teachers might engage students in movement or visual representation to get ideas across, not just spoken word. This is not about simplifying or dumbing down what is taught, the idea is to broaden access to the learning for students. The second is to reconsider how students engage for themselves what is to be learned. Traditional paper and pencil tasks are limiting and don't work for all students. Changing how students engage their learning makes room for their differences to become attributes. Instead of writing a paragraph in response to a text, say something in social studies, a student might choose to work with peers to perform a short play, or work by themselves to draw a diorama of an event from the text. Students are not required to engage in their learning in the same way, they are allowed to engage in different ways. The third big consideration in UDL is about how students represent their learning. From the examples I have given, the play or the diorama would stand as worthwhile evidence of their understanding, taking the place of a paper and pencil exam. In all three cases, varying the means of delivering ideas, setting out varied ways for students to engage the ideas, and expecting and allowing varied expressions of understanding, choice, student choice, is at the heart of all activity. Why is this important? To begin with, these are built on the premise that students are different from one another. That's a big idea and a challenge for our teaching. What follows is important. Students have to make choices for themselves. They have to know themselves what they want from the learning, their learning strengths, their learning struggles, and what they want to improve. This self-reflection moves students from passively learning in a school teacher directed way to a self-aware learning, a learning that expects and encourages their agency. How we, as teachers, set out learning that connects with students, make possible engagement that works for students, accept and encourage worthwhile representation of learning from students, determines how much of who they are matters to their learning. We can set them up to bring their fuller selves to their learning. One last challenge. How do we bring our fuller selves to our teaching? If we accept that each of our students is different in ways that matter to them and to their learning, we have to accept that we are different too, different in ways that matter to us and matter to our teaching. I have long believed that there is no such thing as the perfect teacher, the ideal teacher. We bring different strengths to our teaching, we bring different limitations to our teaching as well. Many of us might shy away from making our teaching about something personal, something that matters a lot to us. Think about the teachers that you admire. What about them makes you remember them long after you were their student? The ones I remember were fully there with what they were teaching, not as a responsibility, but as a passion, a need to share their deep care for the subject with others. What we love and care about is particular to us and makes us unique and different. As much as we should embrace the differences students bring to their learning, we need to embrace and live our differences, our gifts in our teaching. We teach best when we teach what we love. Thanks for listening.