Compliance or learning?

This is a busy time of year in most schools. Substack is full of conversation about how spent many teachers are , checking in on each other, and how we can finish the school year strongly. Students are excited by the better weather, have completed a lot of assignments and are getting tired, and we all can see the glimmer of summer just ahead. Add to this the special events and special schedules, which are all great, but that add to the cognitive load of each week. And many of us feel like there is just too much.

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The thoughts below are not to tell you to let it go, to stop holding in place certain guidelines in your classroom, or to lower your standards. Not at all. In fact, when school gets busy, those classroom structures are important. Instead, this is food for thought about which structures are important to uphold, and which are maybe not as important, and perhaps even get in the way of continued learning.

There is a trap that we fall into as teachers when we design and implement instruction and assignments. We know what we want or need students to know, and we have a clear idea of what the finished product should look like. Let’s take a step back and think about the why.

Remember here that the two most important questions when planning a lesson are What do I want students to know and be able to do? And how will I know that they know it or are able to do it? Think about a recent lesson or assignment in your classroom. As you picture this assignment, do you see the finalized product, and what each student’s work will look like? How will the work be formatted, and what will the answer to each question be? If a student’s submission differs from this format, how will that impact the grade or feedback they get? Now consider the work you receive that might look different. Will this alternate picture also help you to know what a student has learned? Is there any room for a student to show their learning differently or to create a final product that looks different? And when you assess their content knowledge, is there room for variation?

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There are certainly right and wrong answers to learning content, and there are specific behaviors we want students to engage in that help them to learn, and ways for students to demonstrate their learning. But sometimes we create a scenario in which students are answering in a certain way, or completing assignments in a certain way, because they know that is what you, the teacher, wants. At this point, you are asking for compliance, and this is not (necessarily) learning.

Looking for compliance happens during class as well. When you hear yourself conducting a guessing game with students in finding the right answer….a clue is when you are saying, “close, it rhymes with…”, then this is compliance. When a student writes 5 meaningful sentences in a paragraph, and you note that it should be 4, that is compliance. Do students lose points when they write their name on the left side of the paper rather than the right? These are simple examples, but they are a sign of a larger concern. And they are all examples I have seen, more than once.

The structures that we design and implement to support learning are important, the steps we ask students to follow are important. But so too is the opportunity for a student to show they are learning outside of that structure, or with a slight bend in that structure. And especially outside of the structure that has nothing to do with what a student knows and is able to do. An essay can be just as good, and can demonstrate learning, if a name is written on the right side of the paper rather than the left. As the teacher, your job is to make sure that you know and understand the content well enough that you can assess learning even when it does not fit the prescribed mold. And to determine when the mold is important to the learning and when it might be your preference. Think about this when you are designing rubrics, behavior charts, assessments.

Another way to think about this is in terms of who is doing the thinking. If assignments or lessons are so tightly structured that students are not thinking, if they are only looking for the right answer as defined by you or the textbook, then you need to do some thinking. If a student’s assignment shows that they have learned, and that they are thinking, but they lose points because of where their name is written, the color ink they have used, or another structure that is not related to what they know or are able to do, then consider the message that this sends. And imagine how frustrated that student might be, who has put in the time and thinking, learned what they needed to, and still cannot get it right. Imagine their level of investment on the next assignment.

A learning classroom is one in which students are thinking, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and thinking some more. The above examples are all about assignments, and what we expect them to look like. There are ways that our language and design of instruction also expect compliance rather than learning. (A topic to delve into another day.) And generally, in all of these scenarios, it is because we are attempting to make learning more neat, more wrapped up in a bow. But learning is messy, and not straight lined, and sometimes looks different. Consider how students can show what they know and are able to do, maybe outside of the structures. The start and end point for learning (may be) defined, but the journey is not always so clear.