In
my last post I discussed the concept of meaningful work and how it is
essential to the recruitment,development and retention of teachers. In this post I would like to address how meaningful work is essential to student learning. As teachers we have every right to demand the autonomy, complexity and rewards that are necessary to making our work meaningful. At the same time, we have the professional obligation to provide meaningful work for our students, so that we may help activate student motivation to learn and the students may optimize their learning.
As Malcolm Gladwell
has discussed in his 2009 book, Outliers,
meaningful work is one major component of achieving success in life. It is
meaningful work that drives people to master a complex craft, whether it be in
the arts, as with The Beatles and the hours upon hours of practice they got in
Hamburg, Germany strip clubs before they hit it big; or in the sciences, as
with Bill Gates, who spent thousands and thousands of hours writing computer
programs before he achieved success with Microsoft; or in sports, where Michael
Jordan couldn’t even make his high school basketball team and yet through hard
practice went on to become the greatest player of all time. To learn something
well takes time and commitment (and yes, talent. But many talented people have
not achieved greatness).
How do we get this
type of commitment to hard work from our students? One possible answer is by
providing them with meaningful work.
The work that The Beatles, Bill Gates and Michael Jordan did was personally
meaningful to them, so they were willing to make the commitment and put in the
effort. What can teachers learn from this?
Meaningful work
is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work
is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And
work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything
you put in, you get something out…
So meaningful work involves autonomy,
complexity and direct relationship between effort and reward. It may seem a
daunting task to provide every individual in our class with meaningful work as
Gladwell defines it. But let’s take a close look at this through the discipline
that I know best – literacy.
By definition, literacy is meaningful work.
Whether we are reading or listening, writing or speaking, we are in the
business of making meaning or communicating meaning. Too often, however, the
way we teach these skills obscures the meaningfulness of the work. What would a
meaningful approach to literacy instruction look like? A look at Gladwell’s
three elements of meaningful work might be helpful.
Autonomy
In order to provide students with autonomy
in reading and writing, we need to insure that students get a considerable
element of choice in their reading and writing. In reading this means time is
given over in class to independent reading. Students need to be encouraged to
explore their passions through reading and teachers need to be knowledgeable
about a broad range of reading choices and student interests to guide children
toward reading they may be passionate about. As students read independently,
teachers are available to assist students over bumpy patches, confer with
students about their understanding of what they are reading and suggest other
books on similar topics.
As a 9th grader in Benjamin
Franklin Junior High School in 1961, I, along with everyone else in my English
class, was assigned to read Silas Marner, by George Eliot. I am sure Silas
Marner is a great book, but as a fourteen year-old mainly interested in
baseball and girls, I hated that book. I could not make sense of it and
eventually gave up reading it and tried to fake my way through the class and
the subsequent test. The back of the edition of Silas Marner I was
given, however, contained a short novel by John Steinbeck, The Pearl. Sitting
in class one day trying to avoid being called upon, I stumbled across The
Pearl, and started reading. I loved it. I was transported from my classroom
to coastal Mexico and I was transfixed by the graceful sentences wrought by Mr.
Steinbeck. I read it during class, on the bus on the way home from school, and
finished it that night in bed. I quickly became a Steinbeck aficionado and by
the end of high school had read virtually everything he had written (Steinbeck
wrote a lot of short novels that I found great for book reports). My choice to
read Steinbeck unleashed a previously untapped passion to read. If we are to
develop life-long readers, we are going to have to provide students with some
choice.
In writing, autonomy means providing
children with choice in their topics, real purposes for writing and genuine
audiences to receive the writing. Students often aren’t very good at
identifying the topics they are passionate about and that is where the teacher
comes in, helping children identify a passion, a concern, an area of expertise
and helping them find their voice to communicate about these things. I think of
the book Black Ants and Buddhists, by teacher Mary Cowhey, that shows
how an entire classroom of children was activated to read, write and think
critically about issues of social justice through a discussion of a troop of
ants that invaded the classroom one day. Kids feel passionately about many things,
rather than assigning writing topics, we would do better to help students find
those topics of passion and guide them to write about them.
What about the skills you ask? What about
grammar? What about spelling? What about vocabulary? I would argue that when
kids are reading deeply and writing thoughtfully based on a level of autonomy
in the classroom, we can teach any of the skills within that context, either
through directly instructing through mini-lessons or through individual
conferences.
Complexity
Both reading and writing are, of course,
complex processes. The trick here is applying Gladwell’s complexity principle
to teaching and learning. Students are capable of complex work and complex
thought, but this complexity must be mediated by a teacher. Where we want
students to be working is in their “zone of proximal development”, that is, at
a level of thinking that is just above where they can function easily and
comfortably, but not so far above their level that they cannot make meaning of
the material. Writing provides an ideal medium for this type of instruction,
since when children are writing on their own chosen topics and are writing for
their own chosen reasons, the work is uniquely individualized and children are
working in their zone. Teachers can then work with students to move that zone
forward through conferences where suggestions for extending, refining and
reorganizing thought can be conducted.
Reading creates some different kinds of
challenges when it comes to complexity. If a text is too complex for a
particular reader, meaning will be lost and the reader may lose interest. On
the other hand, if the child is particularly interested in a topic, she may
struggle through a “too difficult” text through shear will. As the teacher our
job is to advise students on reading choices, let them try reading things we
may think are too difficult sometimes, and support their growing understanding
of the texts, again through conferences or mini-lessons.
We will also want to provide the students
with exposure to complex texts through read-alouds. Since most children have a
listening comprehension about two years above their reading level and since the
teacher can provide mediation of the text while reading aloud, high quality
challenging books should be chosen for classroom read-alouds. By asking
students to grapple with more complex texts in the safety of the read-aloud
environment, we can help insure both growth in reading comprehension and an
interest in reading more difficult text.
Relationship between effort
and reward
In the business world, the relationship
between effort and reward is pretty clear: You work hard and well and you make
more money. In school this relationship is more complex. A few education
reformers have actually tried paying students for attending school and working
hard with disappointing (for them) results. When we think in terms of effort
and reward for school students we might think of grades, and hard work should, I
suppose, be rewarded with good grades, although you will find many who say that
grades should be based solely on achievement and not include effort.
To me, money or grades are false rewards. I
would prefer to de-emphasize the grade as the reward and focus the rewards on
what all real readers and real writers want – an audience for their thoughts
and ideas. A writer wants to know what a reader thinks of the work. A reader wants
to share thoughts on the reading with others and hear what others think. So as
teachers we must read our students’ writing and listen to our students talk
about their reading and provide genuine feedback that acknowledges what the
student has done well and constructively suggests what the student needs to
focus on next. We need to reward our students with respect for their efforts by
being a knowledgeable audience for their efforts. I don’t think any monetary
rewards or stickers can ever replace a few moments of rapt attention from the
teacher. Students respond to teachers who are good listeners. Reward your
students with the gift of your attention.
If this all sounds to you like a
recommendation for a reader’s/writer’s workshop approach to literacy
instruction, you would be correct. The workshop structure provides the
opportunity for independent reading, personal choice writing, targeted
mini-lessons and teacher conferring that will make the hard work of learning to
read and write well meaningful work.
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