From Seatwork to Feetwork

Engaging Students in Their Own Learning

Ron Nash

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781506338446
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungspolitik

The essential book on student engagement—now fully updated! Ron Nash’s bestseller has helped thousands of teachers to transform their classroom environments by energizing and engaging their students. In this newly revise edition, Nash offers proven strategies to involve students as active participants in their own learning. Teachers of all levels will benefit from:

• The latest research on exercise, learning, and brain development
• New chapters on the value of empathy and the use of feedback versus praise
• Even more classroom examples at all levels
• Novel teaching strategies that align with the Speaking and Listening Skills requirements of the Common Core State Standards

1 Mirror, Mirror

Ed stood at his classroom window with his hands on the high sill, watching the autumn leaves swirl in the courtyard two floors below. It was late October, and homecoming was scheduled for Friday night. Ed had been at this high school for twenty-seven homecoming games, and he had taught ninth-grade U.S. history in the classroom in which he now stood for eighteen of those years. The building was new eighteen years ago, and former students who had been with him when he had helped plant the courtyard trees occasionally came to visit; he had for many years been teaching the children of his former students in this small town, the town where he had grown up. Ed had been “Eddie” then, and he was still Eddie to relatives and the friends of relatives who knew him in his youth. His students knew him as Mr. B.

The old high school Ed had attended as a student, and in which he had begun his teaching career, had become a home for senior citizens. His parents were gone now, but they had been proud of his position as a teacher in his hometown. Ed was a late Boomer, born in 1959; he had graduated from college in 1984, having stayed right through the completion of a master’s degree. The high school principal for whom “Eddie” had caused many a stressful afternoon hired him to teach tenth-grade geography right out of college. The year the new building opened, Ed moved to this classroom and began teaching the U.S. history course he had long sought. Now, standing at his classroom window with the familiar courtyard view, his mind sifted at random through the memories of homecoming games and dances of almost three decades—and the swirling leaves of other late autumn afternoons.

“Mr. B.?”

Ed turned to find one of his ninth graders, a cross-country runner, standing in the open doorway. “Hello, Curt,” said Ed, smiling as he turned from the row of windows. “How was practice?”

“Great,” said Curt, “and my ankle is pretty well healed, I think. It felt good today, and I’ll be ready for the county meet in a couple of weeks. Mr. B, do you have a copy of that worksheet you gave us on Monday? I’ve managed to lose mine.”

“Sure,” said Ed, and he moved to his desk to retrieve a fresh copy of the Chapter 5 worksheet. Handing the paper to Curt, he said, “There you go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay, Mr. B. Thanks. This is due Monday?”

“Yes,” said Ed, and he stood in the doorway while Curt walked down the hallway, stuffing the worksheet into his pack as he walked.

Ed had been married but was now divorced, and he had no children. He had always enjoyed the relationships he had built with his students, but in his quiet and reflective moments, Ed was beginning to experience some doubt about his own ability to really connect with them. His once rock-solid confidence in his teaching abilities was beginning to crumble a bit. As a ninth-grade teacher, he had long since realized that it was at this grade level that many of his students quit school, or at least struggled with school’s relevance to their lives. He had heard enough and read enough to realize that the entire nationwide school system was often unable to connect with a new generation of students who perhaps needed more than the system was willing or able to deliver.

Over the years, Ed had participated in the blame game in the faculty lounge, as he and his colleagues had pointed the finger at the administration (too unsupportive), the textbooks (too difficult), the parents (too lax), and even the students (too lazy) as the sources of problems related to student apathy, stagnant or declining student achievement, the rising number of discipline referrals, and an increase in the dropout rate. Teachers lamented that students “no longer wanted to learn” in the way that “we did when we were young!” Ed had spent many years listening to those tired arguments; teachers came and went, but the patter was the same. The blame game was predictable and seemingly eternal, but Ed was beginning to think playing it was an excuse for not searching for and subsequently finding solutions to those same problems. Making excuses helped Ed and his colleagues avoid looking in the mirror and getting introspective about root causes that might just include their own deficiencies.

Ed sat at his desk and graded a few essays. One of the night custodians appeared in the doorway, and said, “Hi, Mr. B. Do you mind if I clean your room?”

Ed looked up and smiled. “Go ahead, Nate. I’m just doing my homework.”

Looking at his watch, Ed realized that it was almost 5:30. He normally did not eat until 7:00, so he continued to grade papers, glancing up now and then to see the custodian as he straightened the desks and continued to clean the classroom. Ed noticed that the dust mop Nate was using was the exact width of the narrow aisle between each row of desks, and something occurred to him that he had not considered in all his years of teaching—his classroom was set up for cleaning. The distance between rows had not been determined by Ed; it had been set by the building custodians decades ago. A recent visit to another history classroom helped him see this and many other things related to the what, how, when, and why of his own teaching methodology.

At the request of one of the assistant principals in his building, Ed had gone to another high school in a nearby district to observe a history teacher whose standardized test scores were exceptionally high, and he had come back with his eyes—and perhaps his mind—opened. That visit was two days ago, and he could not get what he had seen out of his mind. There had been an assembly during the morning in the school he was visiting, and this resulted in shorter class periods. His assistant principal had informed Ed about the time change for his visit and provided a cover for Ed’s classes beginning at 10:30. Ed drove to the school, signed in and received a visitor’s badge, then headed for Room 112. A student met him at the door and took him to an empty student desk in a back corner of the room. The student took a couple of minutes to show Ed his journal, including the pages at the back where he tracked his own test progress using a run chart. The teacher was making the rounds, pausing occasionally at a desk to have a whispered conversation. She had obviously left the whole matter of greeting Ed entirely up to the student, who was, Ed thought, doing a wonderful job of making him feel right at home.

The teacher announced to her ninth graders that they had thirty seconds to finish, then she walked up front and had them put their journals away in a large plastic pocket at the side of each student desk. The student who had greeted Ed excused himself and went back to his desk. Ed noticed that in this classroom the desks were in rows fairly close to the walls, and they were angled inward. There was a single row along the back wall; there was no traditional teacher’s desk. There was a small cabinet in the corner that the teacher later explained held everything her desk used to hold.

This unique placement of furniture had the effect of opening the center of the classroom, creating a large area that puzzled Ed until the teacher had her ninth graders stand and move to that open space. They raised their right hands and, when instructed, proceeded to pair up, shaking hands as they found partners. The teacher stood on a short stool and had them turn toward her. When they were all facing in her direction, she gave them instructions to discuss the short story on the Underground Railroad they had just finished. There were some prompts on the Smart Board that helped her students get started. While they talked in pairs, she walked around the room and listened to various conversations. She stopped a few times, long enough to ask some of her students if they would share with the class what they had just shared with partners. When the students agreed to share, the teacher thanked each in turn and moved on. These paired conversations went on for a little more than three minutes, and the teacher, standing on her stool once more, raised her hand and asked them to finish their thoughts and turn toward her.

The teacher then had several students share with the entire class what they had discussed, and she recorded four main points on the whiteboard. After this, she had them thank their partners and take their seats, at which point they added the four points, along with anything else they wanted to record, in their journals. While they wrote, she walked around the room and placed a piece of light yellow paper in the shape of a circle on each desk. With two minutes to go in the class period, she asked them to write on the circle any questions related to the Underground Railroad that “were still going around” in their minds. As they left the classroom, the teacher collected the circles and added them to the pile she had from the other classes. As she walked by the desk at which Ed was seated, she leaned over and whispered, “My homework!” The questions were feedback for the teacher, and they let her know what she still had to cover as it related to the pre–Civil War abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad in particular.

Ed was in his twenty-eighth year of teaching, yet he had seen nothing like this. In fact, Ed could not remember observing in more than one or two other classrooms in all that time. He had pretty much been on his own, and this was a new experience—one that had caused him to stand staring into the courtyard outside his room on a cool and breezy autumn afternoon, pondering some important things: In the classroom he had observed, the students seemed to be doing the work while the teacher facilitated process. In his own classroom, by contrast, Ed did most of the work, and his students did … what, exactly? They looked at him, for the most part. They smiled and even laughed on occasion, especially when Ed displayed what everyone agreed was an excellent sense of humor, and they seemed to be taking notes when they needed to. If things seemed fine in his classroom, why was it that the test scores in that other teacher’s classroom were so much higher? Why was it that the essays she showed him were so much better? How was it that her students seemed so much more engaged and … well, happier and more confident?

The truth was that this observation had, over the past two days, caused him to begin to question his own teaching methodology. The teacher he had observed, Peggy Sandillos, spent her entire lunch and prep period with him, discussing how she had created what was obviously a very different—and amazingly dynamic—learning environment in a classroom that was otherwise a physical carbon copy of his own. Peggy told Ed she had come to the conclusion at the end of her fifth year of teaching that she was doing too much work, while her students did too little. They both agreed that students may look at the teacher while going to a better place in their minds. Peggy had a discussion with her students about this very phenomenon, and they opened up, revealing their tricks of the trade, so to speak. They were, it seems, quite good at pretending to “pay attention” while contemplating something completely removed from the content du jour. It was then, she said, that she realized she had to shake things up in her classroom. This was feedback she could not ignore.

Peggy had made the decision to do everything she could to get them truly engaged and to decrease the amount of in-classroom “on stage” work she did on a daily basis. This decision to engage her students in their own learning in a much more active way had been a good move for her and her students, and she told Ed she had never looked back. She was in continuous-improvement mode now, and she would work to make her classroom an even better and more welcoming place for her students. In her new role as a facilitator of process, she no longer led from the front of the room; Peggy led from within, and partnered with her students in a very learner-centered classroom—and she was getting results.

His mission accomplished, the night custodian said goodbye, and Ed straightened his desk, stood, and headed for the parking lot. He pointed his car in the general direction of his favorite restaurant and told himself he would no doubt spend a good deal of time there this evening; he had much to consider. If something was going to change in his own classroom, then he would have to look in the mirror and confront the status quo.

Comfort in the Status Quo

Many teachers move from school year to school year with different faces looking up from the student desks, and cling to the same traditional methods of delivering information. The status quo becomes a comfortable companion. Change is not something people in any organization normally seek on their own or even accept when it comes their way from the powers that be; indeed, people resent mandated change as an outright assault on a status quo that has over the years become a good friend. Members of any organization may resent interference, according to Smith (2008): “There is fear of failure and threats to values and ideals. People are being asked to leave their comfort zones, and naturally they will resist” (p. 16). In four decades in education and educational sales, I have seen this resistance over and over again, and I have been part of that resistance on more than one occasion. Just as we feel comfortable and perfectly happy with that old chair in the den, we feel comfortable and personally satisfied with the way things are in our classrooms. The ones who may become increasingly uncomfortable and out of touch with our status quo may well be the young people of a new century vastly different from the last. They also may be veteran teachers like Ed who have come to the conclusion that students—and the world they inhabit—are changing.

Even if students had not changed over the past several decades, there would be a case for a system of continuous improvement in education. In our own lives, we all want the professionals with whom we work—electricians, doctors, mechanics, roofers, dentists, surgeons, and lawyers, to name a few—to be in constant self-improvement mode. Skills in any of these areas need updating; an example is that of the car mechanic. My first car was a ’61 Chevy. This was a simple machine that was, by today’s standards, easy to maintain. I could look under the hood and see all the way to the ground past the engine block. Looking under the hood today is, by contrast, a daunting experience for a Baby Boomer used to doing basic maintenance. The power plant of a modern car is a complicated piece of machinery and electronics that requires a highly skilled and trained workforce to keep it operating at peak efficiency. Mechanics today need much more than a small box of tools in the way that teachers need more than what was needed in the 1950s and 60s, when I was growing up.

An assembly-line educational system could be said to have worked reasonably well when it fed an assembly-line manufacturing system that created and sold products all over the world, especially after World War II, when many nations were faced with trying to recover from a scale of death and destruction not previously known. The United States had little foreign competition at that point, the unemployment rate was low, and the educational system fed a growing economy with graduates who, by today’s standards, tended to stay with the same employer for long periods of time, if not for their whole careers. A high school student who belonged to her school’s Future Teachers of America club could pursue a four-year degree in a teacher-preparation program and, with role models provided by high school teachers and college professors, continue the best traditions of the profession: lecture, frequent summative quizzes and tests, worksheets, filmstrips, educational videos, and a basic routine that had been relatively unchanged for decades.

The status quo hardens and becomes institutionalized over many years, not only for teachers, but for students as well. In fact, students have learned, as Hattie and Yates (2014) so aptly put it, “the art of becoming invisible.” Every educator reading this book has probably become invisible in a classroom, night class, or professional-development session. Hattie and Yates remind us this is so:

We developed skills enabling us to opt out of lesson participation. It is possible to appear slightly attentive, while avoiding direct eye gaze, avoiding excessive movement, shrinking slightly into the seat rather than sitting upright, or using the bluffing tactics such as pretending to be reading or writing. It is possible to sit in a classroom, away from its focal centre, cause little disturbance, and virtually never be noticed. (p. 47)

If you’re smiling right now, it may be you remember, as I most certainly do, attempting to become invisible, while watching my teachers work.

In classrooms where teachers do most of the work and students sit too often as passive observers, the students, especially in secondary schools, often rely on the status quo to keep themselves passive. Their own status quo may have become comfortable over the years, and they may resist efforts to shift them from passive to active mode. In many conversations with middle and high school teachers, they tell me their students often rebel against standing and getting into pairs for a discussion. This tells me we are not providing opportunities for students to be engaged in verbal collaborative activities in a consistent way from kindergarten through high school. If a sophomore has spent the past several years in passive mode, the teacher who insists on paired and group reflection and conversations is going to encounter resistance. Unfortunately, faced with such opposition from students, many otherwise well-meaning teachers may simply revert to a teacher-to-student communication flow, rather than insisting on the multidirectional discourse that will give students the communication skills they need in the twenty-first century.

Teachers who think today’s students have short attention spans need to watch them as they pursue what interests them in ways that confirm their ability to concentrate and focus in a very real and effective way. According to Prensky (2010), “What today’s kids do have a short attention span for are our old ways of learning” (p. 2). Kids who progress from one classroom and grade level to another in passive mode, watching and listening to the teacher, increasingly see the gap between the choices they have in their personal lives and the choices available to them in classrooms. In ways that have become familiar to them in their personal lives, students want to be directly involved in their own learning. The status quo teachers find comfortable is often teacher-centered and decidedly uncomfortable for students, and te...