Experts vs. Novices: How we talk and listen to students

Recently I was at a school where I noticed several things happen that are frustratingly common in schools and education. It has to do with talking to, listening to, and even how we might unconsciously perceive our students and the work they do. Let me set it up.In one scenario a student was working on a neat project where he was asking the question, "What is quality education?" I thought this was a brilliant topic to be discussing, especially in school. When he asked me to interview, I excitedly said yes. But I asked him for a few minutes to gather my thoughts so I could give him a good answer. The more I thought about it the more complicated it because as I realize it is a pretty broad question. As I was thinking, another teacher came in. He decided to make the best of his time and asked her while he was waiting for me.Now I want to preface that I have a lot of respect for this teacher, and am largely impressed by what I see her doing every day for her students. But this even further highlights how hard it is to rope in our "expert" thinking when we talk to students.This teacher was also really excited to answer, but she seemed very confident in her ability to wing an answer out on the spot. I will very generally describe the conversation:Student: "What is quality education to you?"Teacher: Quality education is about inclusion for every and trying to completely eliminate bias from my classroom. (I want to stress, she said more than this but this was the basic idea).I was a little surprised by her answer at first because I didn't think she really answered the question. She didn't answer the question "quality of education", she described equality or equity in education. As I thought more about it, I quickly realized though her answer actually reflected the "talking points" and buzz of many schools now days. Schools get so caught up in these mainstream ideas, buzz words ideas, that they lose sight of what education is supposed to be, which is the learning. I also wonder if she was just so busy with other students, she just neglected to give the question, the serious attention it deserved. This happens to all teachers, but something we constantly need reminding of to curb this internal bias.A second common occurrence I see involves listening to teachers using buzz words and phrases to address students like: "readers", "scientists", or more specifically asking students to "think like a scientist" or "think like a designer". When this first started to happen I immediately I was bothered by it, but I could never put my finger on it. I dismissed it as my general skeptical mindset with all new things. But as I have seen this trend grow in schools I have finally put my finger on what I find so problematic with this.I will again preface this with the fact that I do understand its general purpose, to promote to students that everyone can be a reader or a scientist, etc... and don't disagree with that. But what bothers me and what I find problematic of this whole is two things. First, just calling students readers, writers, or scientists doesn't really make them one. It also takes away from the work it takes to become one. Now there can many perspectives on this and I can definitely see different sides of this story but it leads to my second issue. This has led to this scenario where teachers when working with students say things like, "I need you to think like a writer" or "think like a designer", or "think like a_________(put in whatever profession you like)". I inevitably look at the students, usually between 8-13 in my experiences, and they have these blank expressions on their faces. I realize that this is at best a pointless endeavor, and at worst a damaging one. These are kids and generally have no idea what a scientist, designer, professional writer, mathematician, etc. thinks like. They have no experience with this. So by doing this these students either just shut down, or worse internalize it as they are stupid becasue they can't do this.I think this of course is coming from a good place in the education community, but we are wrong in the way we execute it. We need to be explicitly telling the students how a scientist would think, or how an artist or engineer, or designer, or reader, would be thinking. Then asking the kids to try thinking in a specific way while doing their task. We need to be careful not to just invoke the name and expect them to know what that means. I even understand that sometimes teachers have taught these things, but I still think it does more harm than good to just invoke a name of a profession, without specifically telling a student what specific skill or concept from that profession you want them to be practicing.To me, both of these situations fit under the Expert vs. Novice umbrella. As teachers, we have too many experiences and too much information about the world and different professions. We forget the lack of experience these students have and their ability to think about them in certain ways. It should always be a constant internal battle in teachers' heads to monitor what they expect and what they say to students. I feel we should always error on the side of too much help or too much scaffolding than not enough.

If you like this I wrote this on a blog post here.

Submitted April 16, 2021 at 07:47PM by rmurphe https://ift.tt/2QyaNWh