Are You Doing More Work Than Your Students?

Alternate Title: Those Who Do the Work Do the Learning.

My alternative title may sound a little bumper sticker-ish to you, but I believe it rings true. If you are doing more work during a given class than your students, guess who's also learning more? You are. Actually, since you already know the material you're teaching, the more important way to think about this is as follows: if you're doing more work, your students are doing less learning. 

I've seen this happen pretty often, and I've fallen victim to it myself. Sometimes it just seems so much easier to keep rattling off example after example of the concept you're teaching; it can seem quicker, and more efficient, to do so rather than give some of that example-generation over to the students. For instance, let's say you're an English teacher (always an easy go-to example for me since I used to be one!). You're up at the board, where you've just defined (or reviewed) figurative language. You then proceed to give your students eight different examples of figurative language from the reading they have recently completed. My question to you is this: why not provide your students with one example (in order to model), and then release them to find the subsequent examples on their own? It may be a little more time-consuming, but the students will be doing the work. And they'll be doing the learning. AND you'll have a chance to check for understanding!

The more and more you do this, with topics ever-increasing in complexity, you may start to notice something: your students may not be enjoying this. Some of them may have grown accustomed to sitting back, taking notes, and generally letting you do all the work. Some of them may even think you are slacking off! Story time: A few years ago, when I was teaching 11th grade English, it was time for my students to study good ol' Henry David Thoreau. In the interest of differentiating based on student interest, I did some small talks on several of his essays from Walden, then allowed my students to choose which essay they wanted to explore in-depth. Once the choices were made, groups were formed, and the assignment was given -- study your essay closely as a group and, following some provided guidelines and specifics, prepare to present this essay to the rest of the class. By the second day of work on this assignment, one of my groups of students starting delivering humorous smirks my way. As I made my way over to their location, they told me they had my number. One of them said, "We figured out why you're doing this this way, Ms. B. You're taking the easy way out because you don't want to read this book, so you're making all of us do it." 

I realized I had not built a culture in my classroom where students were consistently expected to take on ownership of tasks, of content, of areas of study. So, step one is to plan lessons so that you are not doing all the work (and, subsequently, all the learning). But step two must not be ignored, either. Students need to be brought into the loop. Explain to them, discuss with them, why you'll be handing over more tasks to them. Be sure they understand the teaching philosophy behind it. Make them your partners in this process called education.