So Each May Soar

The Principles and Practices of Learner-Centered Classrooms

Carol Ann Tomlinson

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781416630319
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Métodos de enseñanza de la educación

Use this book's curated collection of strategies to reconnect with professional and personal aspirations, build an energized and mutually respectful classroom community, and deliver instruction that feels alive to you and your students.

Carol Ann Tomlinson's role in defining and popularizing differentiated instruction has made her one of the most influential voices in modern education. In So Each May Soa r, she illuminates the next step forward: creating learner-centered classrooms to help all students gain a deeper understanding of themselves, others, and the world.

Join Tomlinson as she explores principles and practices of learner-centered classrooms, including

* What it means for teachers to honor themselves, each learner, and the content they teach.
* How to assemble a curriculum that ignites students' imaginations and drives discovery.
* How to guide classroom experiences that develop the mind of each learner in accordance with that learner's marvelous individuality.
* How to shape curriculum, assessment, and instruction to support both equity and excellence.

Examples from all kinds of learner-centered classrooms clarify what this approach looks like across grade levels and subject areas and confirm its viability in schools with budgets both big and small.

A must-have touchstone for veterans, a beacon for middle-career educators, and a mission statement for those just beginning their careers, So Each May Soar celebrates the commitment of teachers and the opportunity they have to help each young person in their care build a better future and lead a wonderful life.

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Chapter 1

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From Standardized to Learner-Centered

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While we are living in the 21st century, the institution of education started in the 19th or 20th century. It was built to meet the challenges of the past. It was built with resources we had before. And once it was built, society spent the last century perfecting it. … In essence, we are prisoners of the past. To create a modern institution of education we have to escape from the past first.

Yong Zhao in Leading Modern Learning

I began my career as a K–12 teacher with no formal preparation to teach, little life preparation for the job, and more than a decade of declaring repeatedly that whatever I ended up doing with my life, it would unequivocally not be teaching. Two decades later, when I made the difficult decision to leave my role in public school to begin working at the University of Virginia, my passion for teaching defined not only my work but me as well. At the time, I did not realize that my colleagues and I were experiencing the end of a sort of "golden age" of teaching. In those days, teaching and learning seemed alive.

That statement doesn't imply that things were perfect. The rural district and school in which I worked for 20 years were, in the beginning, significantly underfinanced. I had 40 students in many of my classes. My classroom furniture was "rescued" from a warehouse of damaged and abandoned remains. The only classroom resource I did not purchase myself was copy paper, and even that was limited and rationed. For many years, I didn't know there were books about teaching—and, in fact, there weren't very many. We had virtually no "professional development" for at least my first decade in the classroom. Our technology was pencils. The idea of an instructional coach was three decades down the pike. The field of cognitive psychology was just beginning to emerge. We had no insights from neuroscience that could inform our work.

But we had things that mattered as much or more in terms of our development as teachers. We had a good degree of professional respect and autonomy, a culture of sharing, and a cohort of like-minded colleagues who were curious, determined, and fascinated with the possibilities of teaching. Not all faculty members signed on to that cohort, of course, but enough did so that there were always people around who were game for listening, sharing experiences, and asking, "What if?"

Early on, teachers whose experience had made them much wiser than I gifted me with four pieces of advice that shaped my instructional planning and continue to guide my work to this day:

• Identify the non-negotiables for the lesson or unit. "Make sure you know what's required for students to move forward successfully," they told me. "Make sure that sticks. Don't try to do everything."
• Be sure students understand what they are learning. "Memorization and mimicry have a short shelf-life," they stressed. "Conceptual understanding is durable and serviceable."
• Always know where your students are in relation to the non-negotiables. "It's how you'll be able to change whatever needs changing to help them move ahead when they are stalled."
• Make learning joyful whenever possible—and satisfying always. "Plan for engagement," they said. "If you lose students' attention and investment, you've lost the game."

My colleagues and I determined as a group what students needed to know and be able to do as a result of a segment of learning, but the meaning of that content was not prescribed. As individuals, we had to think deeply about why it mattered to teach what we were teaching and be able to help students discover the power in what they learned. Over time, we became adept at looking at our curriculum through multiple lenses in order to "mine" its significance. In turn, our students also began to look beneath the surface of the "what" in order to find the "why." And of course, we shared our thinking about larger meanings behind content and extended it in response to our colleagues' ponderings.

Critical content and its purpose became central in my thinking, but that was always accompanied by the search for a context, a "wrapper," a destination for the work my students and I did together that made it feel purposeful, exciting, fresh—and a little scary, because it seemed a bit beyond our grasp. At various points, my students and I took photographs of common objects around the school grounds or in classrooms or at home, selecting things that had personal meaning for us or evoked strong feelings. We talked about camera angles, backgrounds, light, depth of field, and color. We planned how to communicate the feeling we wanted to share. We made slide presentations of the photographs and selected background music that gave voice to the images we selected. Later, we'd assemble images that illuminated for ourselves the works of famous poets. We wrote "insta-poems" to instrumental music and came to understand the power of sound and words to capture meaning. And we polished our favorite works by using what we were learning about figures of speech, rhythm, grammar, and so on to make the poems "pop." Many of the 12-year-olds in my classroom became fast fans of a literary form they'd previously found off-putting or dismissed out of hand.

Sometimes, I created the "wrapper"—the context through which we would explore critical content. Sometimes I asked the students to develop an idea that seemed intriguing and challenging. One example of that happened in my fourth year as a junior high English teacher, when I asked them to think about what we could do to make literature come alive for them. They surprised (and terrified) me when, almost in unison, they said we should put on a play for the public. I knew only a little more than they did about how to make that happen, so we watched plays, studied criteria for excellent performances, set standards for our work, selected a play, cast it, figured out how to do make-up and lighting, rehearsed exhaustively, and invited the outside world to come see us. Throughout all of that, we had continual conversations about protagonists, antagonists, rising and falling action, themes, oral expression, and dozens of other "non-negotiables" for the year's curriculum. It wasn't necessary to underline or copy examples of literary terms from an anthology; these ideas became standard vocabulary for us—and the words took on a purpose as they helped us think about our work like professionals would. We surprised ourselves and our audiences with the strength of our work. That marked the beginning of about 15 years of dinner theater productions at our school. They grew in scope and quality every year, because every year, we set out to make that happen. As time went on, parents signed on to support us in varied ways, but students remained at the center of acting, set design, make-up, costuming, lighting, advertising, and all of the other roles it takes to make a high-quality drama unfold for audiences. That process did, in fact, make literature in varied forms live for us and in us.

Sometimes, I wanted to give students the chance to explore topics or issues they cared about deeply as individuals as a vehicle for applying skills and meeting criteria for quality that cut across the diverse topics the students selected. So, for several years, my students developed and carried out independent inquiries in a fascinating array of interests—building a computer, planting and growing a garden, learning calligraphy, writing songs, designing clothing, cooking meals for their families or invited guests, using an airbrush as a tool in drawing and painting, learning about family genealogy, writing and illustrating poetry, to name just a few. Students could determine how long they wanted to work on their chosen project (9, 12, or 18 weeks), depending on their goals and the complexity of the task they had defined for themselves. Classes, of course, continued while the independent work hummed along in the background. Students frequently shared insights and challenges from what they were discovering on their own as it connected to what we were doing in class. Common across the performance tasks was the requirement to demonstrate their proficiency with the skills of inquiry—gathering and analyzing background information, setting goals, defining task parameters, delineating criteria for success, establishing timelines, reflecting on progress and outcomes, getting input and guidance from knowledgeable individuals or sources, executing their plans, evaluating and learning from outcomes, and sharing their work with relevant audiences.

At other points, individual students would sometimes ask to develop a plan with me that allowed them to miss some class assignments in order to pursue an inquiry that held deep meaning for them. Geoff conducted research on theories of extinction of the dinosaurs using a computer program he developed (long before personal computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and coding were staples of everyday life) to test some of the current theories. His work challenged the knowledge of several professors who provided him support along the way. Scott created and sold comic books and said later that the opportunity provided him with the only K–12 learning experience that made him see school in a positive light. Amy wrote a good portion of a novel and benefitted in multiple ways from participation in a high school authors' group where older students served as both models and encouragers. In both single-student inquiries and class-based ones, students worked diligently to understand and employ skills like questioning, research, interpretation, presentation, and reflection. Opportunities for independent investigation provided an authentic and remarkably motivating manifestation of the skills in action.

Other Classrooms Where Teaching and Learning Seemed Alive

I was by no means the only teacher in my school or district who found ways to meet students where they were while expanding the "typical" parameters of learning. There was a tribe of us.

My middle school colleague, Mary Harrington, who was both an artist and a math teacher, continually looked for spaces in the community where math was more than a set of algorithms. One year, for example, her students studied the access route architects had planned for a new school that was being built in the district. Their work included looking at costs, materials, safety standards, building codes, and proposed designs—and they found some noteworthy concerns with the design under construction. Ultimately, they took their concerns and alternative plans to a local governing board, along with illustrative photos, charts, diagrams, and architectural sketches. The planning body listened attentively, asked questions, thanked the students for their thoughtful work, and promised to study the information the students had presented. That was affirming and exciting for the young adolescents—but not nearly as rewarding as it was when the new school opened the following year and the students saw that the initial access plan has been replaced with a safer one they had suggested.

Nancy Brittle, a high school colleague who taught English, brought relevance to her students' reading of The Odyssey by asking each of them to conduct their own personal odyssey in the county where we lived. Their job was to seek answers and understanding on a question they cared about, as it existed in the county. The question each chose, she stressed, needed to be one that did not have evident right answers or even any answer at all. Then she set her class free to grapple with uncertainty and make their way through the complex local geography when they did not yet drive independently and when resources for research were often slim—circumstances that helped the poem's struggle feel closer. In their own questions, insights, disappointments, and triumphs, they found remarkable parallels to those in the ancient text. Several decades later, Nancy's former students regularly comment on their personal odysseys on her Facebook page. At another point, she joined efforts with a science teacher to develop and teach a class called Bio-English. Students examined in impressive depth ways in which authors used setting, geography, scientific allusions, and detailed understanding of science to give meaning and substance to stories, novels, and poetry. As you might imagine, science-oriented students developed a far greater affinity for literature—and vice versa.

George Murphy, a high school biology teacher who was determined to teach science in a way that made its fundamental principles and practices feel vibrant, often had his students conduct an archeological dig on and off throughout the first semester. Initially, they couldn't figure out why they were doing the dig or how to determine what they should do with the curious artifacts they found. After a few weeks, the students began to ask much better questions about their newfound treasures, and they began to make much more thoughtful conjectures about the treasures' meaning. As the semester and the digs continued, the students began to have individual and group epiphanies about the process that had once seemed tangential and superfluous to them. They were doing the work of scientists. They were using the scientific process of inquiry to address an unknown. As the semester ended, they presented small-group hypotheses, inquiry processes, evidence, reasoning, and conclusions about the mystery culture buried in the ground outside their high school. Student attention, questions, and insights had the hallmarks of an important scientific conference. Then, during the second semester, George's students developed a new mystery culture and artifacts for students who would follow them in biology classes the next year. They took it as a badge of scientific honor to be sure there were no "leaks" or clues for incoming students. They wanted the experience to be as dynamic and revealing for their successors as it had been for them.

Mary Ann Smith has always been one of my elementary teacher heroes. She requested and received remarkably heterogeneous classes of 3rd graders every year. Many of them came with labels descriptive of learning differences. These labels were irrelevant in Mary Ann's class, however. She knew what her students needed to learn and had a clear sense of where they were in their development toward reaching those goals. She also understood that supporting the students in pursuing their own interests was important in helping them become competent and confident learners. Then, in a sort of instinctive Montessori-like approach, she worked with the students to figure out ways in which they might best be able to find success. The room was "busy." Students worked with reading in a variety of ways. They approached math reasoning and problem solving along many different paths. They found and developed their individual strengths and used those strengths to help them bridge weaker spots. The students also met as a whole class often, sharing their ideas, thinking, process, and progress. They felt capable and comfortable. Hard work was a core ethic in the class, but the work was designed to help students succeed in learning—and to grow as learners. There was no pacing guide, no mandate that every student had to learn in a certain sequence or common way. Every student who walked into Mary Ann's classroom each day did so eagerly—and so did I, whenever I had a chance to visit.

This is just a sampling of many examples of engaged and productive learning from that time period that are still quite alive in my memory. That sort of teaching and learning was not only feasible but also encouraged and supported by school leaders. It's important to note that at the end of each year, all students in the district took a standardized test. The appropriate people examined the test results and looked for and used insights about how we could modify our teaching in the coming year to better the learning of the students we taught. In most instances, student performance grew steadily over time.

Jay McTighe, a co-creator of the Understanding by Design model of curriculum development, uses an analogy I've long found useful. He points ou...