Tuesday, November 28, 2017

"Uncover the Content."

I was recently reading the transcript of an interview conducted by A.J. Juliani. He intereviewed authors Ross Cooper and Erin Murphy about their book, Hacking Project Based Learning. During the interview, Cooper said "It's a difference between covering, right? Covering the content, and uncovering the content."

And that's just it. You can cover content, and get to the end of the semester, and you've taught your heart out, but you don't know if the kids know anything and the test results are completely unpredictable. Or you can let the students UNcover the content, or even DIScover the content, and at the end of the year, they know the how and the why, and they know that they can figure it out, and they are better human beings for having known you.

Let me illustrate this by way of a story: When I was student teaching, back when American history could be taught in a single semester because half of it hadn't happened yet, I was working with a very laissez-faire cooperating teacher. She didn't observe a single lesson I taught, she simply waited in the room next door. Never saw a thing I did. She read through my lesson plans, and often questioned stuff, but she pretty much let me do whatever. Which meant, when it was time for me to go, she suddenly discovered that I was several weeks behind the class that she was still teaching. And she wanted me to catch up with her by the time I relinquished the class. The upshot of which was, while she spent two weeks of mostly direct lecture teaching about the Holocaust, I had... two days.

Two days.

Two days get my students to a really deep understanding of what this event was, why it happened, how it happened, and how it impacted the people then and since. This wasn't just basic world history, after all, this was an honors class required of the magnet academy students at a top-performing Philadelphia high school where about a third of the students were Jewish. These kids were expected to have a DEEP understanding of the Holocaust. And I had two days.

So I bought a copy of Maus, both volumes, and photocopied a few carefully selected pages. The students read, reacted, summarized, and discussed. And afterward, my co-op said, "I don't know how you did it, but your kids can explain the Holocaust much better than mine!"

In two days, my students had a deeper understanding of the Holocaust than hers gained in two weeks of lecture. I didn't have the language then to describe what I'd done; all I knew was that I had improvised like mad to make sure I didn't leave those kids unprepared. But today, I know what I did:

  • First, I determined what the essential learning was: what did the kids absolutely need to know? It wasn't the number of victims, the dates, the locations of the camps -- it was the impact on the people then and since. 
  • Next, I asked myself what was the best way to get at that essential understanding? I didn't want kids to hear me say it, I wanted them to feel it, and I arrived at the same conclusion Art Spiegelman did: they needed to read it in a way that was intense, personal, even graphic when needed: a graphic novel, or comic book. 
  • Finally, what did I want them to do to get this feeling? I wanted them to imagine themselves in those roles, in those times, in that place, and tell their peers what they imagined it to be like. So some kind of Socratic discussion.
Today, we call this student-centered instruction, inquiry-based learning, and using primary and secondary sources. But it's always been good teaching.

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