“Listening to your discussions just now will be what makes my day today” was what I found myself saying at the end of today’s Geography lesson. I was struggling to contain just how stoked I was with the lesson and deemed the moment one of the most praiseworthy in the last week or more. So what was the moment, and what was the discussion? I often get students to grade exemplars as a way of both seeing ‘what good looks like’ (and doesn’t look like) and developing a deeper understanding of an assessment criteria. Do tasks like this help the students to unpack an assessment or gain confidence in their own ability by seeing a peers work? According to them, yes. But, could it also feed into an assessment-focused model which gives into the credit counting mentality prevalent in so many of our students? Quite possibly, yes. And whilst useful for my own assessment or subject purposes, how much, really, is such skill development transferable? The uncertainty of the answer there is one reason why I also explicitly teach SOLO as a framework for thinking that can be applied not only to an NCEA exemplar but to, well, pretty much anything else that involves the brain in some capacity. And seeing how NCEA and SOLO link up is really useful according to the students, at least that’s what they tell me.
I was able to show progression of their own thinking right in front of them with the development of accuracy in their voting task and see them be okay with their initial failures. I was able to say to them that the framework they were using today was so much more universal, so much more sustainable, and so much more versatile for life beyond the course and indeed the classroom, and be understood. And I was able to say that the questions they asked of each other during the discussion they can ask of themselves during a learning task (or exam) and be equipped to tackle it, and have nods of contemplative appreciation back at me.
So to answer the question of what do I really teach, I hope to be able to answer with ‘how to think’. Because I firmly believe that if they are equipped with this then anything can be negotiated - academic or otherwise - and the concerns over an uncertain future are largely reigned in. But they need to know that that is what they are learning, for as Bolstad et al. (2012) once said, it is not enough to expect competencies to simply fall out of everyday practice. What this means is that I found myself, on days like today, doing more direct instruction than I otherwise would. Thinking competencies can be explicitly taught, but this involves, well, explicit teaching. And I am beginning to be okay with this; accepting of the fact that direct instruction need not come at the expense of knowledge construction and student learning, if it is an enabler of thinking.
Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning & teaching: A New Zealand perspective. Wellington: Ministry of Education.