Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 19: Without apology
Academic ethos

The belief that students can't do an assignment or that content will be too difficult or uninteresting to students can slip unintended into our classrooms … and mindsets. Without Apology offers reminders of some ways that can happen and some language that can be useful in preventing it.

Apologies for Content

When I returned to campus at Hamilton College after studying abroad my junior year, every other class in my major was full except British Romantic Poets with Patricia O'Neill. There could not have been a topic less compelling. I imagined a semester of highbrow recitations on the nature of love, but I needed the credit for my major, and so I walked reluctantly and, if I am honest, a little sullenly into the single best class I took in college.

Adeyemi Stembridge points out that a passionate teacher can be the link between student and content, that the teacher's purpose is to model and foster a relationship with the content. So it was that Professor O'Neill somehow convinced me that it was urgent to stay up late reading William Wordsworth and permanently changed the way I think and read. There were classes I took that I knew I would love, but Professor O'Neill managed to inspire me with content that, with my comprehensive nineteen-year-old wisdom, I was sure was irrelevant to me. I suspect most people have had a similar experience, finding that the subject that seemed least interesting came to life in the hands of a gifted teacher.

There is no such thing as boring content, in other words, only content that is waiting for you to bring it to life, to find a way in. In the hands of a great teacher, the material students need to master is exciting, interesting, and inspiring, even if we sometimes doubt that we can make it so. If nothing else, there is always the pleasure of rising to a challenge.

I often hear this argument about book choice: let students choose what they like and they will love reading. That's often fine for independent reading but only by reading the same book can all of us discuss and understand our different perspectives on a given story. Someone is not going to get their choice. Perhaps no one will. And just maybe that's a good thing. It is folly to imagine that an eleven-year-old or a fourteen-year-old knows enough about the options available to know fully what they like. The whole point is to expand young people's horizons, not accept them, and reinscribe them in permanent marker. The more you prove to a fourteen-year-old that his or her knowledge of the world is as yet imperfect, the better. The same child thinks they do not like a certain cuisine because they have not tasted it cooked by an expert. The gift, in fact, is in part learning that what you love may surprise you.

Nor does merely shifting to content that we think will speak to students make a culturally responsive classroom. The foundations of teaching must make the classroom a warm, vibrant, inclusive place that tells students their learning is important. Meaningful teaching helps students feel a sense of belonging in the classroom and connection to the content. As Zaretta Hammond writes, it is “simplistic to think that students who feel marginalized, academically abandoned or invisible in the classroom would reengage simply because we mention tribal kings of Africa or Aztec empires of Mexico.”

Assuming Something Will Be Boring Is a Big Assumption

We often presume that students will find something boring. Think for a moment about accounting, for example. The epitome of boring, right? And yet there are thousands of accountants who love their job and find it fascinating; who read books about accounting for pleasure. They follow fascinating accountants on social media. Perhaps we assume accounting is boring because we don't know much about it. Perhaps we fail to account for variability in tastes. Someone loves every food that you despise and vice versa. Saying something like, “Guys, I know this is kind of dull. Let's just try to get through it” or even “You may not find this all that interesting” as a way of getting students through a topic is apologizing—it's assuming it will be boring to others—and perhaps a bit defensive: If I tell you I don't like it, then if you don't like it, you'll know it's not my fault. You won't think it's me that's boring.

A belief that content is boring is a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one lights a lesson on fire when they've just announced it's no fun. And yet there are teachers who make great and exciting and inspiring lessons out of every topic that some other teacher considers a grind. Our job is to find a way to make what we teach engaging and never to assume that students can't appreciate what's not instantly familiar or does not egregiously pander to them.

“They'll Like It” Can Be Superficial

Just as our reasons for assuming students won't like something can be superficial, so can our reasons for assuming they will. Rudine Sims-Bishop observes that lesson content provides “views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange.” She uses the analogy of mirrors and windows. In a mirror I see myself reflected. In a window I see a different world brought to life. All students deserve and respond to both. For example, as Sims-Bishop points out, “children from dominant social groups … too have suffered from the lack of availability about books about others. They need books that will help them understand the multicultural nature of this world.” And it's also true that students of color are just as likely to be moved and inspired by Shakespeare's words as any other students. “All texts belong to all students,” writes Alfred Tatum. Shakespeare—like Morrison, like Marquez, like Neruda, like Hurston, like Murakami—belongs to everyone.

But there is perhaps a tendency to presume that the mirror will be more engaging than the window, to assume that students will only want to see themselves in content, just as many may be inspired by books or lessons about people of different backgrounds from their own. For some, interest and identity align to the terms by which we see them (“I am Latina”). To others it is less visible (“I am a scientist”). A just school is a school in which every child gains the fullest opportunity to pursue their dreams. We have to stay open to the wide variety of their dreams. Some students will find inspiration in Malcolm X and some in Gregor Mendel. We—and, honestly, they—will never know which is going to be which. When it comes to windows and mirrors, every student should have both.

Blaming the Context

A teacher who assigns the responsibility for the appearance of content in her class to some outside entity—the administration, state officials, or some abstract “they”—starts with two strikes: she is undercutting the content's validity to students and eroding her own enthusiasm for teaching it. The blaming might sound like this: “This material is on the test, so we'll have to learn it” or “They say we have to read this, so …” The negativity here is a self-fulfilling prophecy and also a bit lacking in perspective: if it's “on the test,” it's also probably part of the school's curriculum or perhaps your state standards. You're never going to agree completely with anyone's judgment on what gets included in the curriculum and standards, but it's just possible that the (also smart) people who put it there had a good rationale for putting it there. Reflecting on that rationale can be a good place to start: “We're going to study this because it's an important building block for things you do throughout your life as a student.”

Loving Challenge

Carol Dweck's important work on growth mindset has been widely discussed and applied—sometimes well and sometimes poorly. At its core it reminds us that the fact that something is challenging is a good thing. A willingness to embrace challenge may well cause us to learn more. It certainly prepares us for life's difficulties. So a tiny shift from “I'm sorry, this is going to be hard” to “This is going to be really challenging (and that's a good thing)” can help. Here are some phrases that can help turn apology into opportunity:

· “This topic is great because it's really challenging!”

· “Lots of people don't understand this until they get to college, but you'll know it now. Cool.”

· “This gets more and more exciting as you come to understand it better.”

· “A lot of people are afraid of this stuff, so after you've mastered it, you'll know more than most adults.”

· “There's a great story behind this!”

Apologies for Students

At the first school I helped found, students learned Mandarin Chinese as their foreign language. None were Chinese and many were English Language learners. They were a polyglot of every background culture and color. Knowing how difficult Mandarin is—the tens of thousands of Hanzi, the four tones that cause words to take on new meanings, the simplified and complex alphabets—many outsiders, a few staff members, and even many parents, responded, “How in the world are they going to learn Chinese?” The principal at the time calmly responded that if they'd been born in China, they'd learn Chinese. And so we started. And so they learned. Often with great pride and success. The first step was to believe.

“As educators we have to recognize that we help maintain the achievement gap when we don't teach advanced cognitive skills to students,” writes Zaretta Hammond. We stand at risk of serving students poorly when we “underestimate what disadvantaged students are intellectually capable of [and] postpone more challenging and interesting work until we think they have mastered the basics.”

Sticking with kids, telling them you're sticking with them, and constantly delivering the message “I know you can” raises a student's self-perception. Here are some phrases that can help frame challenge when you present it to students:

· “This is one of the things you're going to take real pride in knowing.”

· “When you're in college, you can show off how much you know about …”

· “Don't be rattled by this. There are a few new words, but once you know them, you'll have this down.”

· “This is tricky. But I haven't seen much you couldn't do if you put your minds to it.”

· “I know you can do this. So I'm going to stick with you on this question.”

· “It's OK to be confused the first time through this, but we're going to get it, so let's take another try.”