On the Shoulders of Giants

When I began my career over twenty years ago, there were names that permeated the landscape--my landscape, at least--of the teaching of English:

Atwell.
Rief.
Ramano.
Fletcher.

It was a time in which Mrs. Atwell urged us to place ourselves literally In the Middle of our students. But she did more than that. Through her intimate journey into her classroom, she forced us to start asking many hard questions of ourselves. 

Ultimately these questions led us to one fundamental answer: student empowerment.

Which is sort of ironic because at its very core, isn't education innately about just that? None of us invite in our students and aim to lessen them by the time they leave our classrooms. None of us. It's not who we are.

But--and please believe I still find myself doing this very thing more often than I would care to admit--I make far too many choices for my students when they could be asserting their own desires. And I think for too long our profession has embraced this because it is how we were taught. We stepped into our classrooms that were mirror images of all the classrooms we'd ever stepped foot in. We embraced the status quo.

Atwell and others, though, provided another way to think about strengthening our students by giving them agency. By having them, through meaningful choices, find their voices.

And those of you brave enough to combat the pushback from what was once considered fairly radical recognize how empowering, rewarding, meaningful this paradigm shift has been. Once students trust that we are sincere in our approach--that we want them taking risks, we want them to defy our expectations, we want them all pursuing that which inspires and intrigues them--they begin to own what we had once owned for them.

*   *   *

My career's success--whatever it is--is not only due to those mentioned who are widely-famous, but to those who are more locally-famous to me. Those teachers who were still smiling and learning and loving what they did thirty or even forty years in. They inspired me when I first started out, and I find myself trying to emulate them virtually every day.

If I can see a slightly different landscape, it is only because I am still firmly seated on their shoulders.

Steve
December 1, 2016