Creating and Developing a Culture for Learning and Questioning: Who's doing the Work?

Guiding students through this process is not a technique that can be stapled onto our existing pedagogy, nor is it something that teachers can be trained to master during an in-service day. What’s required is a continual focus on creating a classroom that is about thinking rather than just absorbing information.
Alfie Kohn (Ed. Leadership, Sept 15)
Working in the field of school improvement and with professional development this comment really resonated with me. I agree totally. No professional development will work or impact students if the educators don’t use (with integrity) what has been modeled and shared with them. However, with that said, first they must internalize that whatever this change is, is a positive change for their students. For years I worked with the topic of differentiation. Many time educators would try something one time, come back and say “that didn’t work.” and then not want to try it again. Much of the lack of implementation lies with culture issues. What is the culture for teacher learning? When did they have the opportunity to discuss why it didn’t work? What were the assumptions that were made that students were not successful? Where was the environment of learning encouraged in PD, let alone the classroom? The quote, “You can’t simply “throw students in the deep end” and expect them to take responsibility for all their learning decisions.” Fits perfectly here. Too many times the skills that need to be taught are the organizational structures for students in order to be successful with differentiated lessons or units. If we allow different pace, content, learning process, or environment due to differing needs, where have the skills been taught that will scaffold for success when students are working in small groups or somewhat independently? What are the skills needed for organization? What are the skills needed for collaboration? What are the sills needed for mapping progression of learning? Who has verbalized and mapped the assumptions of learning? Who has taught the skills that fall into the assumptions? If all of this is skipped and an alternate assignment is given for the sake of progress or differentiation – no wonder the expectation doesn’t match the end product! There are many skills and sub-skills to be taught, modeled, and build scaffolding for in order to assure success.

photo by Linda Moehring, "Sculpture within Scaffold" Paris, France October 18, 2015

It takes more than 1 professional development day to do this for educators, and it will take more than one day for students. First we much consider the culture of the learning environment. Does the culture embrace the fact that all students have the right to challenging learning opportunities everyday in every classroom? Does the culture promote autonomy of learning? Does the culture support all students to learn the skills that they need to move forward? Does the culture recognize that what is needed by different groups might have very different looks and a very different pace? How will you support students to evaluate their learning and set goals for further challenge? Lastly, possibly the most important question that I could have written the entire post over, which I continually ask staff and myself when working with my own students, “Who’s doing the work, who's doing the cognitive lifting?” If the answer is me - I better start over.