This e-mail wasn't from a former student; it was from a student I have in class right now.
What this student was really saying is that they missed what I refer to as the "Mrs. E Show." It's my presentation style; it's how I have presented (not taught; there is a difference) science concepts for almost 14 years now. I am loud; I am crazy; I have been known to jump on my demo table and act out ameboid motion. I get excited about science, and try to dream up great ways to present science to my students. The Mrs. E show is a good show, and very entertaining (if I do say so myself), but it hasn't done much to improve student learning. I was working very hard at planning instruction, but I wasn't doing much to plan for learning. In fact, some have called this pseudoteaching-and I am inclined to agree.
So I pulled the plug on the Mrs. E Show about 2 months into the school year.
Instead, I have been experimenting (Ha! Science teacher pun!) with putting some educational theories into practice. One of them is to promote true student understanding of concepts by having students work in collaborative teams. This isn't traditional group work, where a teacher assigns a task and one of the students does all of the work, and everyone gets the same grade; in these teams, students fill out a planning calendar with deadlines already marked in for them as to when tests and "learning checks," as I call them, will be. Students then decide what activities they will do in order to learn the specified objectives (we were run over by the Rick Stiggins train and use "I can" statements) by the deadlines; it is required that they plan for in-class activities as well as any outside practice/preparation that may be required. My job is to formatively assess groups daily to see if they are progressing, or if they need extra help. There are no group grades; each student is assigned a score based on their understanding of the I can statements.
The most important part of this type of collaborative setup is that the students are in charge of their own learning; they learn as a team, plan as a team, fail as a team, and fix their own learning as a team. My role is to facilitate, help, encourage, guide, and pose questions to the teams. My motto is, "Learning is messy. Don't be afraid to make a mess." My job is to help clean up any of the learning "messes" they make along the way, and assessing how well they are progressing and mastering the I can statements.
It hasn't been very popular, with students or parents.
Why? I think it's because my students, mostly 9th & 10th graders (and their parents), have been trained that the traditional methods of instruction are the "correct" methods--that's all they have experienced for the 9 or 10 years before they encounter me. The notion that they need to do the learning, not having the teacher do the work of learning for them, is foreign to them. As you can imagine, this paradigm shift has been a little rough on my students. I have changed the rules on them; they can no longer "work the system" in order to get by--they must be involved and engaged in their own learning. And they are not happy about this.
I have been accused of not teaching my students. I would argue that, by taking myself off the "stage" in the front of my classroom, I have taught my students more in one year than I ever have in my 14 years of teaching. I have gotten out of the way of their learning.
All of this unhappiness, and the frustration it may cause, is worth it to me. Because, in my gut, I know what I'm doing is good for them, good for their learning. Even if students can't see it, I can see that they have learned much more than just science this year. This collaborative structure is helping students develop skills they will need to learn on their own, and work with others in their future careers. It's refocusing students back on learning, not on how well they can watch teachers do their jobs.
What do you think? Are teachers today sometimes getting in the way of student learning?