Is High School Nothing More Than a Hoop to Jump Through?

Fifty-six percent. That was the percentage of my high school students who said that the grade matters more to them than what they learned. To be honest, it felt like a punch to the gut. After forming meaningful relationships this year, after giving them tons of choice, after having them focus on student agency, fifty-six percent still view what we did as a hoop to jump through to get to the next--and in their perception--more meaningful step: life after high school.

How could this be? How could almost sixty percent of my students reject my entire year's efforts to convince them otherwise? I don't know what the emotion was. Befuddlement mixed with a tablespoon or two of something that felt like incredulity. So I read their explanations, searching for something to explain my failure.

Here is a sampling of the student responses I read:

High school is just a hoop to get to what you really want to do in life.

[School] used to be fun and now it's just tests tests tests and no fun, and when the teachers try to make things fun they can't because the district has banned fun (sic)

I feel that I view school as something I have to do but don't want to do.

If you don't meet a certain criteria your grade drops or it makes you think of yourself like your (sic) not good enough or smart enough but we all have different and unique ways of expressing what we learn and how we write it or read or do our work. We can't do what we like to do.

To clarify, my district hasn't "banned fun"; in fact, the district I work for is quite eager for students and teachers to push the boundaries of educational reform. But the negative perception lingers, clouded perhaps by the high stakes state testing environment in which many of these students have grown up with and within which we still are required to function.

And as I read, I found something unexpected: myself.

Minus the testing issue, these had been my exact thoughts about high school. It just was what it was: something I had to do. Even though I loved to read and write, I remember only really wanting to do the work in my wood shop classes. And though changes in the education world have shifted expectations for what school looks like now, and though I went to a small rural high school, I had some fantastic teachers who tried their best within the context of the educational expectations of the day. Interesting that I find myself thirty-some years later looking in the mirror and seeing them and wondering if I had been the source of the same frustration.

Ironically perhaps, serving in the Army taught me that I might have a few more smarts than all my years of schooling convinced me of. Personally, I didn't really become hungry for learning until well after high school. Truly hungry, that is. So...

Does High School Really Matter?

High school matters. I know it does. It has to. We meet them where they're at and we try to push toward something new and hopefully more important. But I'm wondering in what ways it does matter, and how for my students I can make it matter more in the moment?


There have been many studies over the years about whether or not high school matters. (Does high school matter? Does High School Determine the Rest of Your Life?) One longitudinal study of 25000 students even disputes the current belief that AP and advanced classes better prepare students for college work. The authors write that "the courses that students took in high school had very little impact on college grades" (When the Value of High School Is Exaggerated).

But, they're in college, right? So that door, at least, was open for them.

Regardless of the percentages, I think that's what we have to hold onto--that it is our job to help open doors for students and to convince them that they're worth walking through.

Next year, I'll keep doing what I think is the right thing for students: to connect, to inspire, to convince them that the work can be important not just for now but for the long term if we make the right decisions, if we focus on truly meaningful topics and projects, if we write like our life depends on it.

I'll keep opening the door to this opportunity, and keep hoping that more and more of my students will choose to walk through it.

I'd love to hear your comments on this.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

You might also be interested in these posts about writing with voice and authority.

Emphasizing and Assessing Student Agency

One of the truisms of teaching is that you get what you emphasize. As a teacher, if you want X, you emphasize X. If you want students to use dialogue in their narratives, you emphasize it. If you want them to show their work in math or science, you emphasize it. If you want them to verify the credibility of sources for a history project, you emphasize it.

With the movement toward personalized learning, student agency is increasingly entering our professional conversations. So, it follows that if we want students to move more toward agents of their own learning, they could probably benefit from a heightened metacognitive awareness of their agency.On most days, students rate their own student agency, but we routinely use this form for peer and teacher assessments as well. Some days, students are partnered up, and at the end of class they peer assess for agency.

Out of several definitions of student agency being used in the professional literature, our PLC began building our own understanding using this one from The Knewton Blog because of its clarity and action-oriented phrasing:

Student agency refers to the level of control, autonomy, and power that a student experiences in an educational situation. Student agency can be manifested in the choice of learning environment, subject matter, approach, and/or pace.
  

Aversion to Agency

 
Interestingly enough, most of our high school students find this an agreeable idea, but they are confounded or even resistant when it comes to actually taking charge of their learning. In short, it takes too much work to chart their own course. Add to that, they are genuinely concerned about deviating from what they've become accustomed to doing, which is working toward their teacher's goals and not their own.


We use a Google form (at right) to help students grow not only more knowledgeable about student agency, but also more comfortable in thinking about the role that agency plays in their learning. (Notice the more student-friendly agency definition we use on this form).

The data we gather from this form allows us to think tangibly about progress-or lack of progress--toward students taking increasing ownership of their learning.

We routinely sort the data on the Google Sheet (where the data from this form gets sent) to review with students the trends in their agency assessments.

Improvements we're thinking about incorporating are for each student to maintain their own Google form and own Google sheet and then have them share their sheet with us. This would shift the responsibility for this data to the students and would allow them to sort, work with ways to present the data, and I believe, would help them further heighten their awareness of their agency. A problem this would create is that peers and the teacher couldn't assess a student unless the form was shared with us, creating some issues with multiple documents (and for the teacher with one for each student per class). That said, students could hyperlink their agency assessment form to their green sheet, which would allow access as well as commentary.

 Like everything, this is a work in progress. But, we noticed significant shifts this year in student perceptions and awareness of their agency and its relationship to what we hope has been meaningful learning for them.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this topic. Please consider sharing this with others.

Update: I just read this very thorough article from Zahner History that could help streamline the information-sharing fix we want to incorporate.
  Thanks for reading,
Steve  


You might also be interested in these other posts about using Google Sheets: Seminar Assessment Using Google Sheets, Teacher To-Do List.