Because there are 20 people in the room

Bambi Betts, Director of the Principals' Training Center (PTC), once said to me that the only reason we do many of the things we do in our classrooms is "because we have 20 people in the room." In other words, NOT (or at least not necessarily) because it’s best for learning. I immediately knew she was right, but it is only recently that I have come to reflect on just how right she was.

The courses offered by the PTC are going online this year and so, along with all the other PTC trainers I am in the middle of reshaping the course I teach each summer for an online environment. I am not a huge fan of online courses. While I have taken a couple that were excellent,  most are decidedly mediocre. A forced shift like this really makes you think, though. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe talk about the ‘twin sins’ of education  - coverage, and activity-based teaching. I have to be honest and say that there are times when no matter how much I try to design learning experiences around specific learning objectives, I find myself defaulting to creating an activity which will work to keep 20 students  (or 40, actually, in the case of the PTC), active simultaneously. Being freed from the constraint of having to think of what 40 people will be doing simultaneously has allowed me to focus much more on what might be necessary for different groups of students to achieve the learning outcomes. The change is actually much greater than I had anticipated.

The structure the PTC has put in place for the courses has helped me enormously in my thinking. The online courses will be structured around four chunks:

1. Watch & Engage  - which everyone will do and which will largely happen synchronously (90 minutes to 2 hours each day).

2. Get Perspectives  - opportunities for students to test their thinking against the thinking of others in the course and beyond.

3. Practice Skills  - exercises for students to practice the skills objectives.

4. Go Deep  - opportunities for students to go more deeply into particular aspects of the content.

Thinking through the Watch and Engage chunk has forced me to really think about what it is that every single student absolutely needs to have access to. Also to consider what pieces of the course really require me to be there with the students to guide, identify misconceptions and foster thinking in the moment.

Get Perspectives has pushed me to think more deeply about what perspectives students need to encounter and how they might encounter them. It has also made me consider where it is most beneficial for students to interact, discuss and get perspectives from each other and where they should really be doing some thinking on their own.

The sections which have really changed the way I think about a course I have taught for 16 years running though, are the final two  - Practice Skills and Go Deep. Skills practice requires that every student is working at their own level. In the past, to be honest, this aspect of my PTC course has been quite weak.  Not having 40 people in the room has enabled me to think about ways that I can truly differentiate both the actual skills each individual may need to work on and the different levels of guidance / scaffolding they may need in that practice.  If I shift to an ISB context and think about the variance in readiness of students in my Grade 10 Social Science course last year in a skill set like argument writing skills, this might have meant creating practice exercises at different levels for a variety of skills like:

• structuring an argument

• structuring a paragraph within an argument

• structuring counter-arguments

• using a variety of language tools to introduce different perspectives

...among other things. A bit of work to set up, but when I started playing around with allowing students to work more from their current level of ‘readiness’ last year, I did indeed see a much greater level of individual progress.

Go Deep offers equally rich opportunities for differentiation, but perhaps more around interest. This chunk has allowed me to think about what individuals or groups of students might be interested in investigating more deeply, regardless of whether anyone else in the room is interested in the same thing. Once again, let me think about how this might have looked in my Social Science course from last year. The course includes a unit on social justice, where we used apartheid as the shared illustrative content. Beyond the range of choices I already offered it might have meant providing opportunities to:

• investigate the role of sport in the anti-apartheid movement

• investigate the role of music in the anti-apartheid movement

• go more deeply into the role that young people, especially students, played in the anti-apartheid movement etc.

Every one of these possibilities seems to have the potential to motivate certain students, and perhaps even increase their motivation in other aspects of the unit.

One thing is for sure  - even if I go back to teaching my PTC course in person next year, the course will look nothing like what it did before the pandemic. I won’t be planning for 40 people in the room. I will be much more thoughtful about what the whole group really needs to do together and about where I should be offering opportunities for individuals to practice skills and to explore aspects of the course that interest them in more depth. 

It’s actually pretty interesting what a simple structure like these four learning chunks can do to stimulate some different kinds of thinking. It will definitely positively affect any future teaching I do at ISB as well.