Why High School Teachers Need to Go Back to Kindergarten

One of the most fundamental and compelling--as well as one of the most nebulous and challenging--shifts in education is the burgeoning approach referred to as personalized learning. Fundamental because this approach has been around for eons (think apprenticeships). Compelling because tapping into personal interests increases motivation through ownership.

But the personalized learning movement--at first glance--can appear quite daunting. It seems somewhat ill-defined at this point, and accompanied by the widespread adoption of one-to-one devices might be interpreted as an online free-for-all with little academic grounding. Add to that the expectations to now differentiate for each individual student, and climbing Mt. Everest backwards and blindfolded seems somehow more achievable.

What is often left out of any discussion of this movement are honest conversations about responsibility. One of the greatest ironies of education is that we have said, probably as long as such things as students and teachers have existed, "I wish insert-student-name-here would take more responsibility for his/her learning."

But, you see, it's not that they won't, more often the truth is that they can't. Why? Because we have not allowed them the gift of taking genuine responsibility for their learning. We haven't asked them what they wanted to learn; we have, instead, told them what they were going to learn. We have for a multitude of reasons spawned by a multitude of pressures, opted for conformity and uniformity and hoped that our students would somehow find enough motivation to elevate themselves to our preconceived notions of acceptable performance.

If we did grant them some freedoms in pursuit of assignment completion, they weren't choices that amounted to much responsibility.

Even if we did open the barn doors wide, we kept them corralled in a pen.

Write a paper of this length due by this date. But you can choose your own thesis.

Perform this experiment using this equipment. You can choose your partner.

Give a report on a famous figure of your own choosing. Presentations must contain 10 slides--one for each category--and cannot exceed 4 minutes.

Again, there are a numerous reasons (many quite legitimate) that this has been the case for far too long. But besides the work being more uniformly easier to grade, we have perhaps made our jobs more uniformly destructive for ourselves and for our students.

We get burnt out on work that the students don't seem to want to do and that we don't really want to grade. Students don't take ownership, nor do we, really. We shift the blame, point fingers at checked-out parents, the ills of too much screen time, and we may even resort to complaining about the lower grades not getting the kids ready.

Sure, those may all be true or not true at all. It doesn't really matter.

What matters is that if we want to do right by our students--and by ourselves--we focus on the following:

Trust--the students are going to trust that they won't be penalized for taking risks and for failing. Long-lasting, genuine, meaningful, powerful learning--heck, all significant advances--are built on taking risks, learning from failures, and having the gumption to try again. And we have to trust that this new paradigm is worth the release of our strict control. Compliance begets mediocrity, if that.

Responsibility--meaningful decisions should be shared between each student and the teacher for the trajectory of their learning. Our job is to provide our students a forum for growth--a sandbox, of sorts--where they are free to take charge of their learning, to discover, to dream, to experiment, to fail, to own their learning, and to thrive.

Sounds a lot like kindergarten, doesn't it? Those of us at the secondary level might want to do what we can to rekindle some of this magic.

Perhaps the biggest challenge won't be convincing ourselves or our students of the necessity of this paradigm shift, it'll be trying to convince our colleagues and our administrators. The answer and perhaps the antidote to this will not only be student performance that not only meets, but will most likely exceed standard, your classroom will be a place where you and your students are genuinely excited.

And if nothing else I've written is true, there is no denying the infectiousness of excitement.

How would your high school experience have been better if it were more like kindergarten? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading,
Steve