"You didn't teach us, you just walked around and helped us."
"We had to teach everything to ourselves with the activities you had on the website. You never helped us by giving us notes or anything."
"I missed having you in front teaching us. You are so funny and explain things simple."
"I don't think it's fair that we have to do more work after we get the right answers on a test. Other teachers don't make us show connections between the I cans."
My first reaction to these comments was dismay-dismay that I had failed to make my students see why I was setting up learning activities for them. I always told them the purpose behind class activities, the reason behind me walking around the classroom instead of being up in front giving notes, and the rationale behind making connections between concepts in order to achieve true learning. But it seems that I didn't make it all clear enough. Or, maybe I did, but they just can't see past 9 or 10 years of academic damage that's been done to them by a traditional "memorize the entire book and recognize the right answers on a multiple choice/short answer test that the textbook company made and we'll give you an A for that and we'll say you learned something" style of education. Yes, I consider it damage; damage that must be undone in order to get them to truly learn. And I only have 50 minutes, 5 days a week for 9 months to try and undo it all.
My second reaction was one of hope. Yes, hope. These kinds of comments wouldn't be occurring if I weren't pushing (shoving?) them out of their comfort zone; the comfort zone that traditional education has created over the years. You know the zone--the one where the "good students" get rewarded for effort, compliance, and surface-level learning. This backlash has been happening all year, because a few of them have e-mailed me several long and hateful e-mails about how I teach, how my tests are constructed and administered, how much more work they have to do one one of my projects, and how I should just be satisfied with them getting the right answer on a multiple choice test, give them their A, and move along. These e-mails, by the way, have been coming from those students considered to be some of the best students we have. This is where I am finding the hope--the hope that this backlash means that their boundaries are being tested, that their minds are being opened, that they are truly beginning to learn. This resistance is all part of these very traditional students becoming acclimatized to a nontraditional classroom (a process of acclimatization which some say looks a lot like the stages of grieving). They may not like it, but learning is happening whether they realize it or not --even if it's just to have them learn that real learning is hard work.
My last reaction to these comments came in the form of a realization. As I continued to reflect on my survey results, one thought popped into my head, and it was so profound to me (an educational epiphany!) that it should have been accompanied by trumpets, flying cherubs, and blinding beams of heavenly light:
"Someone forgot to tell these guys that the role of a teacher has changed."
Maybe not profound to some (I can almost hear the "duhs" reverberating throughout the educational blogosphere), but very profound for my situation with my students. As much as I tried to emphasize my new role in the classroom, they were still viewing me through the lens of traditional teaching, which has been modeled for them for many years prior to the computer-selected joy of experiencing me. And my job was made even more difficult by the fact that I was probably the only teacher they saw all day doing the crazy things I do. (Amazing how, in our collaborative school, I still forget that other classes and teachers even exist outside my four classroom walls. A case for "wall-less" schools is never more needed than now.)
This revelation also begs another question: who's informing the parents that there's a new way of "doing school" and how teachers are supposed to teach? I think we do a good job of communicating new best practices concerning teaching amongst educators, but not to students and their parents. All educators know that everyone considers themselves an expert on education, because everyone went to school. But we have to remember what version of school they went through; if they experienced school 1.0, we need to give them the upgrade to the current version.
So, next year, I am going to do some things very differently. I am going to send home more detailed information than I did this year about what exactly is expected of their student in my student-centered classroom. I am going to have an informational parent meeting about a month into the school year, so parents can get their questions answered directly from me rather then getting the information about what's going on in class filtered through their student.
But, most importantly, I am going to keep informing my students of the reasoning and value behind how my class is structured. I am going to keep putting the responsibility for learning and making decisions about their learning on them. I am going to keep getting up and rambling on and on about how memorizing isn't good enough, and that we need to go beyond what the textbook says and make connections to the world around us.
In other words, I am going to keep doing what makes sense for students and their learning.