How to make students (and teachers) want to go to school

Michele Freitag |  May 2023

2024년 2월 28일 shadowing 완료

 

 

 

TED Talker/연자

Michele Freitag

Horizons Teacher (GT teacher, grades K-4) at York School District

Every September, for the last 55 years, I’ve done the following routine. I get up earlier than I want to, put on my best outfit and head off to the first day of school - again. That’s right. I’ve been going to school for 55 years. Now you might ask, Why would anyone want to do that? The answer for me is quite simple. I love it. I loved school as a child, and I love it now as an adult. I always liked learning at school. I got along with my teachers. I loved them. They generally liked me back. In fact, let me tell you about my favorite teacher, Mrs. Erga, my third grade teacher. She was less than five feet tall. She had the biggest heart. When she was in college, she lost a leg to an illness. Just three weeks later, she marched on crutches at her college graduation. That’s heart. And she brought that same heart into the classroom. Every child in her classroom felt loved and appreciated. And she made learning fun. So I have tried to bring that same heart to my teaching. So yeah, I loved school. 

And Awards Day, that was my favorite because it was often a highlight of the year to bring an award home. So what was not to love, right? It turns out that’s not the case for everyone. Let’s look at my own family, for example. My husband, he liked school enough. Why my kids didnt love school He didn’t love it. And Awards Day? He hated it. 
Because he knew no matter what he did, he was not going to be going up to get one of those awards. And it's not that he isn't smart. He's plenty smart. It's just that the general instruction didn't fit the way he learned. Then came along my three sons. I was like, Ah, I know they’re going to love school just like I did. They were early readers. They loved learning. Super curious. I thought this is going to be great. Not so much. They did okay, but - they did great, actually - but some of the times they really struggled because the way they learned didn’t fit that little box. They needed something different to tap into their myriad of strengths. So as parents, my husband and I spent a lot of our time, instead of celebrating, we spent it helping them figure out the system and how to work within it, which is one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about changing the system to make it work for all students.

I’ve been teaching for almost four decades, and in that time, I’ve had lots of wonderful moments with students. But right now, I want to share a story with you that is the kind that rips a teacher’s heart out. It was just a few years ago. I was teaching fourth grade, giving a reading assessment, and I noticed this little boy sitting over there with his head down on his desk. So I walked over; I said, “What’s wrong, hun?” And he looked up at me with these big, tear-filled eyes, and he said, “I can’t do this. It’s too hard. I’m just not good at this.” That broke my heart. Now imagine that for a minute. Imagine if that’s your child. Or your grandchild. Or your neighbor’s child sitting there crying, feeling like a failure because of an assessment question. In that moment, that child was broken. Broken by a system that is too focused on isolated skills and test scores. A system that is filled with assessments one after another, building pressure: pressure on kids, pressure on teachers. It can be a real pressure cooker at school, and I believe we can do so much better.

 

So, I looked at that child, and I said, “Honey, put the test aside. Come up to my desk, let’s talk.” We talked for a few minutes. I had seen him during our read aloud times. He gave great answers and connections to the books we were reading. So I talked to him about the story he just read, and I wove in the questions that were being assessed. And as my suspicions were, he knew the story well, he understood it, and he had the skill being assessed. He was shocked when I said, “Honey, you just aced the assessment. Go ahead and sit down.”  The reason why I knew what that child needed at the moment was because I had taken time to get to know him. I’d listened to him. I knew what he needed. Teaching begins with relationship. It doesn’t matter if you’re teaching students in a school, mentoring adults in a job or coaching members of a team. It all begins with relationship.

 

After you’ve established that, you can use some strategies that I call CRSSP strategies. The C stands for choice: giving students choice in their learning, not unlimited choice but meaningful choice whenever possible. This empowers the students and engages them in their learning. R is for relevance: making sure that the learning is meaningful to the students. This helps them to connect to it and engages them in the process and makes their work purposeful. The first S is for strength-based learning: focusing on my students strengths and talents and building from there. When we focus on deficits, it can be counterproductive. It can end up leaving the student discouraged, disheartened. But if we begin from a position of strength, it’s easier than to tackle the challenges. The second S is for specific, honest and positive feedback. I would catch my students being good, catch them doing well, or most importantly, catch them working really hard through a difficult situation. And I would use those minutes, moments as encouragement to build their confidence and to build their enthusiasm, because success breeds success. And when we begin by focusing on success, we can then tackle those challenges, and the students are able to hear the constructive criticism they need to hear in order to improve. The P stands for passion: making sure that I know my students well enough to know what their interests and hobbies are. Because knowing what’s important to them can allow me to weave that into the curriculum in a way that I can engage them and hook them and just pull them right in. 

Now, the next unit in my classroom was a unit on non-fiction reading and writing. I politely and respectfully set aside the teacher’s manual. Because I knew from experience a way that I could teach it called guided research, which is something I’ve used for years in my gifted ed program. I knew that I could make it more engaging and also employ these CRSSP strategies. Here’s how. First, the students are allowed to brainstorm a variety of topics that they’re interested in and choose the one that they want to learn about. That one decision alone taps into choice, relevance and passion. Next, I try to reawaken in my students that natural curiosity they have. I have them think things like: “I wonder how, wonder why; I wonder if.” And they use that kind of thinking to develop questions to help them dig into their topic and really learn about it. Along the way, they’re going to start researching. And when they’re researching, I can help give that positive feedback. I can weave in those skills from the teachers manual in a way I call just in time learning. What that means is they learn the skills they need when they need it, just in time, when it's relevant in the process. That gives me the opportunity, as they’re working at their own pace, to give them positive feedback. And for strength, I ask the students to volunteer for different tasks that they are good at. What are they an expert at? This not only empowers my students, but it allows me to be the guide on the side instead of the sage on the stage. And it also cuts down on wait time. At the end, they’re allowed to choose how they’re going to present what they’ve learned. Again, tapping into choice and their talents and their strengths and their passions. I’ve had students create videos, books, puppet shows, games, even programming games on the computer about their topic. And these are fourth graders. Fourth graders. If we allow our children to use their creativity and show their learning in an authentic way, they will.

 

I’d like to share another time when I used CRSSP strategies.  After I tell you about that student who had been crying. He gladly researched his topic. He enthusiastically did it. He created a slide show, and on the day he presented, there were no tears, just lots of pride in what he had done. Other students said to me, “Can we do extra projects just for fun?” I was like, “Uh-huh.”

 

So, another time I used these CRSSP strategies was when I was teaching third grade way back in 2005. I had just finished reading aloud a book called Gooseberry Park. It’s a delightful story about these animal characters who have to help each other after a strom. My students loved the book, and at the end they said, “Mrs. Freitag, could we write to a movie company and ask them to turn this book into a movie? Because it would make a great movie!” And I said, “It would, and we can, but they may or may not choose it. And even if they do choose it, it probably will take them years to produce. So really, the only way you’d see it while you’re still kids is if we did it ourselves.” They were like, “Could we? Could we?” Since I’d suggested it, I kind of had to say yes. So, they spent the next six months rereading the book, writing the script for all the scenes, creating all of the claymation figures, taking over 6000 pictures and doing the voice work, and then weaving all of that together into a 20-minute long stop action video that is still shown at our school today. Some of the other teachers said to me, “Michele, how can you possibly fit this in? There’s no time.” My principal said, “Michele, how can you be sure that you’re covering all the standards, and they’re getting all the skills they need?” I was able to reassure them. I was able to tell them exactly what skills I was covering in reading, in writing, in performance skills, in tech. I wove it together. When we do that, when we integrate the learning, we can buy ourselves time to make those choices. 

Now, over the years, my colleagues and I, we have seen a lot of changes, a lot of reform. There’s been lots of research that’s come out to tell us what best practices are and how students learn most effectively. Things like the importance of hands-on, relevant learning, things like how important voice and choice are to engage students. But during that time, there’s also been a huge shift in education towards test data collection. Now, accountability is important, but how does that fit with what we know are best practices? I believe the system is very out-of-balance. Along with changing guidelines comes new curriculum. And very often teachers are asked to teach this new curriculum with fidelity. And what that means for some people is that all teachers must follow the teachers guideline and do the lessons in order all the same so that all students are getting the same thing. There are actually districts out there that go into classrooms and check to make sure that teachers are on the same page. I suggest that teaching with fidelity is not the same as teaching with integrity, which is where you look at what the desired outcomes are, and you figure out how to get each student there.

Teachers want to teach this way.  They want to teach this way, but all too often, their hands are tied. Did you know that right now, teaching is the profession that has the highest percentage of burnout by a wide margin? And while there are lots of factors to that, I believe one of them is the deprofessionalizing of teachers. Let me say that again: the deprofessionalizing of teachers. See, in far too many classrooms, teachers are not allowed to use their training, their knowledge their experience, their wisdom to ask things like: What would work best for this class? What would motivate that student? How can I make this more meaningful? What teachers need? They need the same thing as the students. They need these same things. They need to be able to make choices in their classroom to use their experience and their wisdom to look at the students in front of them and see what will meet their needs, their interests and their abilities. We need to know they have permission to do this. They need to be empowered to tap into their strengths, their talents so that they can teach most effectively. But someone who is valued and empowered, an employee, is going to bring more enthusiasm and passion into their work. And the great thing about enthusiasm is it's contagious. So when students capture that enthusiasm, when they’re valued and have a voice in their learning, we will no longer have a student sitting at his desk with his head down crying. We will have empowered, confident students engaging in their learning in a meaningful way.

 

I have loved teaching for 39 years. And I’ve loved going to school for 55 years. Wouldn’t it be great if every student who walked through our doors, loved coming to school? Thank you.

 

 

Words&phrases/어휘공부

• on crutches :  stick with a piece that fits under or around the arm which someone who is having difficulty walking leans on for support: Marty was on crutches for six weeks when he broke his leg. 
• fidelity : the degree to which a copy of something shows the true character of the original The fidelity of the tape recording was so poor that you could not understand much of what was said.