Stealing Learning

The teacher I am student teaching under at the moment has a great expression she uses with her first graders when they blurt out an answer while a classmate is trying to construct an answer or when they let a classmate copy off of their paper.  When she sees this happening, she admonishes them to “Stop stealing ______’s learning.”  I love that this is an explicit norm in their young classroom community -- that every child is capable of learning and that every child has the right to learn in their own way and at their own pace.  It reinforces the idea that every learning activity is not a race to the finish line, but a journey to be shared.  It is also a journey to be experienced a bit differently for each student.  

The idea of “stealing learning” is one that we, as teachers, must heed as well.  We are learning in several of our methods courses about the importance of posing open-ended questions and fostering discussion of all responses, right or wrong.  We need to create an environment where mistakes and misunderstandings are valued as learning opportunities.  The most important question we can ask in teaching any subject is “Why?”  “Why do you agree or disagree?”  “Why does that make sense to you?  Explain your reasoning to us.”  These questions expand, rather than contract the learning of all involved.  As students are pressed to articulate and defend their thinking, their ideas become clarified and cemented in their brains and the sharing of ideas helps all to extend their thinking in new directions as they consider the new thoughts presented by their classmates.  

As a teacher (and a parent), I often want to jump in to help a child who is struggling, but I am learning that this is stealing their learning too.  It is so hard to give only a vague guiding hint and harder still to answer a question with another question, but I am learning that these are the greatest gifts we can give to a struggling student.  We need to leave them in the struggle, providing only enough scaffolding to keep them engaged in the task. They need to search for their own way to make sense of the problem at hand.  On the other hand, we don’t want to let them get so frustrated that they become defeated and give up.  We must take care to keep them in the Zone of Proximal Development (Zygotsky) -- challenged slightly above their current abilities, but not so far above so as to be unattainable.  I am finding it very hard to find just the right way to nudge students in the right direction without telling them too much.  Also, every student will have a slightly different ZPD so we must carefully consider what types of scaffolding we are providing to each individual student and differentiate accordingly.  We also want to make sure that we aren’t putting students in a situation where they are seeking the one right answer that will please us instead of grappling to make meaning and sense for themselves.

These are skills that I need to continue to work on and also norms that I want to be core values of my future classroom.  I want to foster a community of inquiry and collaboration, one that values different learning levels and styles, and one that values learning over finding the right answer.  I don’t want anyone’s learning to be stolen on my watch!