Eavesdropping

Sometime last week, I was waiting outside a restaurant for my name to be called so that I could be seated. My wife, Erika, was with me and she is fully aware of my propensity to watch people in public. People-watching is one of my favorite things to do and she tells me all the time that it borders on being rude. Nonetheless, I was watching a group of young adults in their early twenties and I couldn't help but overhear their conversation. They were discussing high school and while some of them were quick to hate their experiences, one young woman defended her time there as positive. Her evidence came back to one teacher in particular that made her appreciate American history. (Now you know I was hooked!) She talked about trench warfare lessons where the students built trenches from classroom furniture and threw foam and paper balls at one another in a recreation of World War I. While she was speaking about the teacher's methods and how she allowed her students to experience their content rather than listen to it, she was also recalling key pieces of information that I couldn't help but notice. She used key vocabulary and could tell why they did what they did as a part of the teaching process.

So here was a student, at least 5 years displaced from the classroom, that could recall key information from a high school lesson. While contemporary research speaks volumes about how students are simply memorizing information long enough to test in our age of assessment, this young woman was proving that wrong. Her experiences allowed her to learn things that we associate with standards and vocabulary comprehension, but she knew it only because she associated it with good teaching.

So here's my take away, and I don't think it's going to be what you are expecting. While you might think that I'm talking about active learning or project-based instruction, I'm not necessarily advocating for that. What I am advocating for is this: Do your students associate you with good teaching? If not, it doesn't matter how much planning you did or out-of-seat time they have, the connection was lost. The conversation that I overheard had much more to do with her connection to the teacher than that teacher's methods. There are many of you that have different teaching styles that work for you and may not necessarily work for a teacher down the hall, and that's ok. The question that each of us needs to consistently ask of ourselves, is "Does my style actually work for me?" If not, it's time to change it up!