Exorcising the Class-Control Teacher-Demon Within
Monday, 8 January 2007 Clay Burell 
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Anybody got some holy water? I need a tub of it–full baptism. Because as a teacher, I still have serious issues with giving control over to my students.
I want to direct everything.
Today, I’m tempted to try this experiment with my history class. Just announce:
“These four web-lectures on the French Revolution will be the text for this class. You’ll have an essay test in two weeks on the material. That will count for 50% of the unit grade. The other 50% will come from how you contribute to a class-produced wiki textbook on the material. You tell me how I should grade each person’s contribution. And you tell me what that wiki textbook could include, and look like.”
Then basically SUMO (“shut up and move over”) for the next two weeks, monitoring and drifitng around a class-turned workshop.
But the pathetic thing is, I’m uncomfortable with the idea–because I know the students will probably freak at not being handheld through the unit. They don’t know how to learn and problem-solve very well (or do they?). They seem to only know how to study for tests.
Anybody want to play therapist to a 20th century teaching addict? Because I’m preaching to them that their future requires “comfort with discomfort,” a “habit of mind that accepts that learning new things will never end”–and I’m a big hypocrite. Scared of their discomfort; scared of learning this new thing called 21st century teaching.
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No. 1 — January 8th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Your posting connects strongly with some reading I was doing in a book called “The Teaching Gap” by James Stigler and James Hiebert. While part of the book focused on the TIMMS study, the other focus was on teaching patterns. In one chapter, the authors talked about a cultural “script” that we follow as teachers and as students. That script is so ingrained in us that it’s very hard to break out of it. If we follow the author’s logic, both you and your students are following this script. You learned it when you were a student and so that script is still carrying over into your work.
I say go for it…be the “guide on the side.” As they work through the unit, get them to write/talk about their discomfort as well as the things that they like about this new way of learning/teaching. Can they find parallels to the way they learn outside the classroom? I’ll look forward to seeing how this plays out. Good luck!
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No. 2 — January 9th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Thanks for the friendly shove, Diane.
It worked; I tipped.
Now that the other history teacher has agreed to join me in this, it will be so much easier to navigate and reflect on all of this.
Again, thanks~I know all of this stuff, and have finally learned the tools and seen their literacy value clearly enough to be ready for a fuller commitment. But I don’t “kuh-know” that fuller commitment.
Hm. That means I’ll have to learn. Why should a teacher do that?
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