Teachers and Students as Co-Learners

Abstract

Learning offers one of life’s great, never ending adventures. We teachers freely admit that, like our students, we too are fortunate to have much to learn, and that we look forward to sharing the adventure of learning with our students.

Background 1—We are All Learners

The teacher centered paradigm sees teachers as part of an edifice of infallibility, (i.e., teachers can do no wrong; they are always right). If one brick in that wall of infallibility breaks off, the entire house of cards faces peril. However, this false belief in teacher infallibility clouds students’ understanding of how knowledge is created and acquired. In the student centered paradigm, we encourage students to expose and help to repair the many flaws in the education system and in the world’s current body of knowledge. Students’ exposés may sometimes be off target, but that is okay; we need to help students develop an attitude of constructive criticism.

Strategy 1—Celebrate Negative Feedback

When criticized, most people, including the authors of this book, immediately feel an urge to defend ourselves and even to retaliate against those who made the criticism. However, such behavior by teachers in the face of student criticism makes it less likely that students will risk providing negative feedback in the future. Instead, we should thank students for their feedback and invite them to explain the evidence for that feedback, as well as to suggest how the feedback might be used. Furthermore, we should welcome more such feedback in the future.

Even if it turns out that the feedback is flawed, the fact that students give such feedback should be celebrated. Even if we suspect that students give the feedback with less than constructive intentions, we should respond as though the feedback was given with the best of intentions. As Goethe, the 18–19th century philosopher optimistically wrote, “Treat people as they are and they will remain as they are. Treat people as they can and should be and they will become as they can and should be.”

This strategy links to Chap. 10 on Motivation, because it gives students more control over what happens in class, and more control can lead to a greater sense of ownership, which, in turn, can lead to greater motivation.

Background 2—The Effects of Expectations

In line with the above quote from Goethe, a famous study from about 50 years ago found that when teachers have high expectations for particular students, those students tend to live up to their teachers’ high expectations and learn well (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968). Similarly, however, when teachers, rightly or wrongly, have low expectations of students, those students tend to learn less well. The researchers labelled the power of expectations “The Pygmalion Effect” after the George Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalion, which later became the musical “My Fair Lady.”

After the initial study of the effect of teachers’ expectations of students on learning, another set of researchers reported that this Pygmalion Effect also applies to students’ expectations of their teachers. In other words, when students think they are being taught by high quality teachers, the students seem to learn more, and vice versa.

If, in the spirit of Teachers and Students as Co-Learners, we admit to students all the things that we don’t know, won’t that lower their expectations of us and, thus, impede their learning? Not necessarily. What if we can convince students to change their definition of good teachers from those who know everything to those who are keen to learn and know how to learn?

Strategy 2—Show that We’re Lifelong Learners

The next time something related to what we are working on in class captures our fancy, we can share our excitement with students, let them know how we will go about learning more, and invite them to join us on the adventure. Later, we and our student fellow investigators can report to the rest of the class on what we think we have learned, how we learned it, and what we still want to know. Warning: teachers shouldn’t take all the responsibility for answering questions which arise in class; we should leave some questions for students, or let them take the lead in answering questions, with us, the teachers, only doing some supplementary investigation or just providing guidance.

A great example of an opportunity for a teachable moment for lifelong learning came a number of years back when a scientific consensus emerged that Pluto should no longer be considered a planet. Not only was scientific knowledge involved, but the issue also provided opportunities to explore how science is done.

This strategy links to Chap. 3 on Learner Autonomy, because teachers model lifelong learning, learning that can go on without being in a class led by a teacher, and without dependence on a fixed textbook.

Background 3—Teachers Share About Themselves

Teachers and Students as Co-Learners does not mean that teachers are students’ best friends and that we hang out together a lot. However, it does mean that we teachers share a little about ourselves with students. Such sharing fits with the concept of Learning Community (Roth and Lee 2006), where the main goal is the learning, and a feeling of human community promotes that goal.

Also, cognitive psychologists tell us that we humans learn by connecting new knowledge to what we already know and have experienced. By telling a bit about ourselves, teachers model the making of those connections. However, sharing a bit about ourselves doesn’t mean we spend big chunks of class time regaling students about our opinions and experiences. When George was a pre-service teacher, he had a cooperating teacher who tended to do that. The focus in SCL is on the students, not the teachers.

Strategy 3—Make Connections to Our Own Lives

Teachers tell students about an experience we had recently or long ago that connects to what the class is studying. Then, teachers encourage students to do the same.

Connections play a powerful role in constructing knowledge. Students can make connections between what they have just read and something they read or viewed previously (text-to-text connections) and the world around them (text-to-world connections), but also to their own personal lives and experiences (text-to-self connections).

Text-to-world connections can also be built by making a time during class for students to share information they find relating to the topic the class is studying. This can be done in any subject, not just social studies. Every day the news is full of information about math, science, literature, the arts, etc. This also has the positive side effect of building reading and listening skills in content areas.

This strategy links to Chap. 5 on Curricular Integration, because it shows connections between what is being studied and the wider world.

Background 4—Sages Versus Guides

Many metaphors have been used to describe teaching, including Teachers as Entertainers and Students as Audience. This entertainment metaphor explains the title of a book written by a teacher back in the 1980s, 900 Shows a Year: A Look at Teaching from a Teacher’s Side of the Desk (Palonsky 1986). In this metaphor, students are the passive customers, waiting to be entertained, except that stand-up comedians seldom give tests to their audiences; that wouldn’t be very funny. SCL seeks to change this paradigm from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.”

As one teacher explained it, “We teachers seem be the ones who are exhausted at the end of the day, while the students rest their bodies and minds.” In contrast, the student centered paradigm seeks to involve teachers and students in collaboratively “performing” for each other, rather than teachers doing all the performing—until test time. Students benefit from performing, because performers are the active, thinking ones. Similarly, there’s a saying that “Those who teach learn twice.” We learn by teaching others. We learn by being active. Let’s all of us, teachers and students, go home exhausted but satisfied.

The saying “Those who teach learn twice” finds an application, for example, in a learning technique called Reciprocal Teaching (Palinscar and Brown 1984). In this technique, students are first taught a set of comprehension strategies. They then take turns playing the role of teacher, teaching their peers how to use these strategies. Research suggests that students who use this technique significantly improve their comprehension skills.

When students teach us and their classmates, they learn from the experience. For instance, when George was in high school, Social Studies was probably his best subject. One day, his Social Studies teacher asked for volunteers to teach some of the upcoming topics, and George volunteered. He was assigned to teach about the governmental structure of the Soviet Union (which was still around back then). That teaching was an eye opening experience for George, not so much about the Soviet Union, but about how tough teaching is! From that experience, he gained newfound respect for teachers.

Strategy 4—Let Students Teach

Look for opportunities to let students teach. A simple way is for them to teach their group mates, which should be easier and less threatening than teaching the entire class. For instance, each group member has different information (either given to them or found by them), and each takes a turn to teach their information to their group. This could be as simple as every student telling about themselves or each doing a separate question and sharing their answer and how they arrived at the answer. Teachers need to remember that students may be as inexperienced about teaching as George was; so, they probably need a couple teaching tips, such as: (1) teach from a mind map or other graphic organizer to help you remember the main points and present them in an organized way; or (2) make sure that your “students” understand all the terms you use.

This strategy links to Chap. 9 on Learning Climate, because it creates a more participatory classroom climate.

Background 5—Listen to Learn

Sometimes, students do not listen to us teachers. While students may be physically present in class, they do not focus on what we are saying. Instead, they chat with each other on topics unrelated to class, stare into space, or distract themselves with electronic devices, such as tablets and phones (which also can be great learning tools when properly integrated into the lesson).

Such lack of attention in class has come to be called incivility, but students are often not deliberately being rude; they are simply not motivated by what is happening in the lesson. Also, students are not the only ones guilty of uncivil behavior. We teachers sometimes fail to listen properly to our students. The following, probably fictitious, story about a teacher not listening to a student involves an elementary school teacher who did not let the student finish her thoughts. Instead, the teacher was so sure he knew what the student was going to say and that the student was wrong that he continued to interrupt her.

Listen to Your Students

Once a rather stern teacher asked a student to make a sentence beginning with the word I.

The student started with, “I is …”, but before she could finish the sentence, the teacher, with a disappointed look on his face, interrupted the teacher: “No, no, no. It’s ‘I am.’”

The quivering but determined student attempted to start again with, “I is …”, but again, the teacher, his face reddening, snapped, “How many times do I have to tell you? I is first person singular. Thus, the correct form of the verb to be is am. Are we clear?”

With a defeated look on her face, the dutiful student mechanically stated, “I am the ninth letter of the English alphabet.”

Strategy 5—Take Time to Understand What Students are Trying to Say

As the saying goes, “Seek to understand before seeking to be understood.” Besides, as we strive to understand what students are trying to communicate, we should look for the good and build on that.

Another useful strategy is to give students a bit more time when they try to answer our questions. Giving students a wait time of around 3–5 s can make a lot of difference in the quality of their answers. Too often, teachers become impatient and wait for one second or less!

This strategy links to Chap. 8 on Alternative Assessment, because assessment should be on-going and should include not just students’ answers but, more importantly, the process students go through to arrive at or at least seek to arrive at answers.

Background 6—Building on Students’ Experiences

One way for students to teach us teachers is to talk about topics that students know but we teachers do not. With such topics, roles are temporarily reversed, with students being the ones with more knowledge, and teachers depending on students. In this role reversing process, students learn about explaining clearly and patiently, while teachers are reminded how it feels to be the ones receiving help. Also, many students are very shy to ask for help, but maybe if we ask them first, students will feel more comfortable asking us.

For students (both the speakers and the listeners) to be truly engaged, this needs to be a real conversation, in contrast to the pseudo conversations common in classrooms in which teachers prompt students to talk about something which is already familiar to the teachers and perhaps the rest of the class. Researchers use the term “display questions” for questions to which teachers already know the answers. The term arises because teachers are asking students to display their knowledge—but the answers provide no new information on which the class and teacher can build new learning.

Strategy 6—Tap Student Expertise

Think about topics on which students might know more than us. Examples might be their families, their past experiences, culture popular among their age group, their opinions, their daily habits, the electronic devices and software they use, and where they live. If students are from a different country or culture, this opens up many additional opportunities for teachers to draw on the resources these students bring to class.

Another way to put students in the expert role is called “community mapping.” This is an inquiry based method in which the mappers discover, organize, and analyze the areas where they live or study, or any other area that is significant in their lives. Community mapping helps teachers better understand students.

This strategy links to Chap. 5 on Curricular Integration, because students’ expertise often lies outside of school; thus, by tapping student expertise, we integrate what students learn in school with their lives outside school.

Background 7—Journaling

Student journals (Sampson et al. 2013) are similar to diaries and have many uses in learning, and not just language learning. Indeed, students learning math, science, and other subjects also use journals as another window on what they are thinking and feeling about course content, about how the class is taught, and other areas. Students’ journal entries often benefit from feedback, which can come from teachers and from peers. This feedback should focus on ideas, not on matters such as punctuation, grammar, and spelling.

Strategy 7—Ask Students to Write Journal Entries

Journal entries can be done in hard or in digital copy, and can be done regularly or only once or twice in a term. Whatever teachers are wondering about regarding their students, or whatever students they think their teachers should know about them? For instance, what are some of the problems students encounter in school and at home? Those are all good topics for journal entries. Also, we teachers can write journals entries on the same or different topics.

Note from the authors: We know that we promised that all the strategies in this book would be quick. Giving feedback on an entire class of students’ journal entries isn’t quick, but we’ve used this strategy lots of times with so much success that we included it anyway. Plus, teacher feedback can just highlight a few points in each entry.

This strategy links to Chap. 4 on Focus on Meaning, because feedback on students’ journal entries mainly focuses not on matters of form, such as spelling, grammar, or punctuation but on the meaning of what they are saying in their entries.

Background 8—Sharing Our Learning with Our Students

Reading (in hard copy or digital form) is a gateway skill that assists students regardless of what subject they study. Reading outside of class provides learners with a time tested way to improve their reading ability. Unfortunately, students seem steadily less likely to use their spare time for reading. Instead, many students prefer to access the increasingly bedazzling array of largely mind numbing software that runs on the increasingly varied array of electronic devices on offer. One of the best ways to convince our students to read more is an indirect approach: let them know that we teachers are enthusiastic readers (Jacobs and Farrell 2012).

It’s fine if all we have time for is a local newspaper (print or digital copies) or online news sites. Also, what we are reading doesn’t need to be something that our students are likely to want to or be able to read. The point is that we are reading and that we are inviting our students to join the community of people who enjoy reading and benefit from it. Furthermore, we can also learn by viewing. For example, TED talks and other informative videos present information in a concise form, often with transcripts for reading.

Strategy 8—Tell Students What We are Reading/Viewing

How to let students know what we are reading/viewing? If we have your own classroom, we can post a sign near the entrance to our class with our name and what we are currently reading, for example, “Mr. Aaron is reading ‘Math Curse’ by John Scieszka and Lane Smith.” The sign has two parts: (1) our name, which isn’t likely to change (at least not very often); and (2) the name of the book, magazine, website, etc., which will change fairly often unless we’re reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace, which is about 1500 pages long.”

For instance, a friend of Michael’s recently visited a school where not only the teachers but the administrators and the school secretary had signs by their doors announcing what they were currently reading. When other school personnel share their reading habits, it sends an important message to the students that reading is not just something teachers do.

If we don’t have our own classroom, two others ways to show off our love of reading are: (1) carry around what we’re reading or if we use an ebook reader, stick a label on it with the name of what we are reading; and (2) tell students about what we’re reading as we ask about where they are visiting in the wonderful world of reading.

This strategy links to Chap. 6 on Diversity, because everyone can read different books, magazines, blogs, websites, and we can discover new reading materials from each other and then share what we learned.

Background 9—See Our Teaching Through Students’ Eyes

Teachers learn in many areas, including how to improve our teaching. Student evaluations of teachers provide a tool for us to gain feedback on the how and what of our teaching (Ackerman et al. 2009). Also, when we ask our students what they think of our teaching, their ownership of their own educations—a SCL hallmark—increases. Of course, just as with evaluations of teachers by principals and others in the education hierarchy, evaluations of us by students are only meant to provide data for dialog; they are not inflexible mandates for or against change.

Thus, for example, just because a majority of our students do not like a particular aspect of our teaching does not mean that we should change that aspect. Similarly, just because most students like a certain aspect of our teaching does not mean that we should keep it forever. Likewise, students should be encouraged to evaluate themselves as learners and to reflect on what is working for them and where they could improve their learning skills.

Strategy 9—Ask Students to Evaluate

Teachers can use many data collection techniques to gain insight into how students view our teaching. A simple data collection method takes place via a questionnaire consisting of statements to which students respond via a 5 point scale, ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. Younger students can use smiley face, neutral face, and sad face. Just a few of the possible items for this probably anonymous questionnaire could be: gives clear explanations; talks too much; is fair; gives assignments that are too tough; and has a sense of humor.

Questions for student self-evaluation could include: I am good at organizing my work; I ask good questions; and I know how to find out more about what we study in class.

This strategy links to Chap. 7 on Thinking Skills, because it encourages students to develop their skill in evaluating.

Your Turn

Please reflect on the following questions.

• 1. Have you seen others, such as your own teachers or your colleagues, using any of the SCL strategies mentioned in this chapter? If so, what was your impression?

• 2. Have you used any of the strategies discussed in this chapter? If so, how did it go?

• 3. Are you keen to try any of the strategies in this chapter that you haven’t yet tried? If so, how do you think your students might react? Would you modify any of the strategies in any way?

• 4. Do you have any colleagues who might like to discuss this chapter with you?

• 5. How else do you or could you promote the idea of Teachers and Students as Co-Learners?