Whose responsibility is it?

The other night I heard one of my sons watching a YouTube video that I had seen in one of my classes recently.   In it, 18 year old Texas student Jeff Bliss lectures his teacher about her classroom practices. “If you would just get up and teach ‘em instead of handing them a frickin packet," Jeff complains, "there’s kids in here who don’t learn like that."  Jeff goes on to say that “You want a kid to change and start doing better? You gotta touch his freakin heart. You can’t expect a kid to change if all you do is just tell them.”  The video went viral and sparked a lot of discussion about teaching practices and about student and teacher roles.  A lot of the debate centered on whether it is mostly a teacher's responsibility to be get kids excited about learning or whether students need to take more responsibility for their own learning. 

When I asked my son what he thought about the video, he admitted that there had been times where he had felt a lot like Jeff.  We talked a bit about those times.  It wasn't long, however, before he started telling me about a particular teacher whom  he really admired.  That teacher had not just covered content but had taught the learning strategies and study skills that he needed to remember and utilize the content.  He came out of that class feeling more confident as a student.  He wished that he had had that teacher earlier because he was sure that it would have helped him to have been more successful in his other classes.  I don't know if that is what Jeff Bliss meant exactly by "touch his freakin heart," but it must be something like that.  I couldn't help but feel that that teacher's willingness to do whatever it takes to help students be successful lead, in turn, to students being more willing and able to take more responsibility for their own learning.  It just isn't an either/or proposition.

As a Classroom Support Teacher (CST) for the last seven years, one of my main tasks has been to help teachers to come up with goals for students with Individual Program Plans (IPPs).  On almost every one, teachers either want to explicitly create a goal page for "greater student independence" or they work the words "independence" or "independently" into other goals.  One of the most common concerns expressed is that students will become dependent on the assistants, accommodations or support that I am recommending.  We are big on this independence thing.  During these conversations with teachers, I talk a lot about "scaffolding" student learning and of withdrawing that scaffolding over time.  I talk about explicitly planning for this withdrawal and about teaching the skills needed for greater independence.  I wonder, though, if I need to talk more about the importance of student success and growth in confidence.  If we withdraw supports too quickly or deny them all together, we reduce the chances for success and therefore reduce likelihood of students taking more responsibility for their learning.

And what about those students who might need certain supports for the rest of their lives?  Is there a problem with that?  I need my glasses to support my vision and pencil and paper to support my memory.  I will likely always need them.  Do these "crutches" make me more or less independent?  I still use a spell-checker and calculator.  Using these tools helps me to be more successful and gives me greater confidence in performing tasks that are difficult for me.  I have become quite masterful at using them, in fact, and I would argue that my performance on writing and mathematics tasks with these supports has been able to develop far beyond what it would have if I had never had access to them.

It could even be argued that writing itself is a "support" for our mind and our memory.  In Plato's  Phaedrus, Socrates argued that writing weakens the mind and the memory and the relationship between teacher and learner.  He's got a point. In fact, when Jeff Bliss criticizes his teacher for handing kids a "packet" instead of getting up and teaching them, he is making a similar argument.   A book (or a "packet") can't respond to questions or ask them.  It can't form a relationship.  On the other hand, print is has been extremely helpful in preserving and distributing knowledge well beyond what was possible through oral means alone.  I wouldn't be writing this blog post if I didn't believe in the value of print.  People today often make similar criticisms of digital technologies, arguing that they destroy traditional literacy.  I disagree, but I think we do need to use them critically and deliberately, specifically teaching the skills needed to use them successfully.

We need to be clear about our goals, not just about digital technologies or just for students with IPPs, but for all of our students.  If we want students who are independent learners and who take responsibility for their own learning, we need to plan for that.  There may be a number of different ways of wording it, but I think that the Universal Design for Learning folks over at CAST have got it pretty close when they state that:

“The goal of education in the 21st century is not simply the mastery of content knowledge or use of new technologies. It is the mastery of the learning process. Education should help turn novice learners into expert learners—individuals who want to learn, who know how to learn strategically, and who, in their own highly individual and flexible ways, are well prepared for a lifetime of learning.”  CAST UDL Guidelienes 2.0 

This won't just happen automatically for all students if we focus exclusively on covering subject content.  We must also take responsibility for teaching students how to learn successfully and for helping them to develop a desire to learn and a confidence in their ability to learn.  We have to stop treating this as a threat to the development of student responsibility, and see it instead as the necessary prerequisite.  In the end, we would do well to remember that:

“You want a kid to change and start doing better? You gotta touch his freakin heart."