Teachers Still Matter: The Case for Content Mastery (Burn 2 Learn Series: Part VI)

Written by: Andrew B. Raupp, HKSEE / Founder STEM.org?

Part II: Navigate

“Quantity can redefine quality: meaning can and does change if something gets big enough to pass some invisible but real threshold.”

-Bill McKibben, environmental scholar

For those of you naughty ones who skipped right over that nasty administrator section, we warmly welcome you back to the fold. Reader beware, there are three more of those chapters to come, but we promise to make them teacher-friendly, so at the end of this section, stick around won’t you?

We’ve arrived at the second part of this resource: Navigate. In the next four chapters, we’ll look at some practical ways to navigate the information you’ve just learned about STEM, the Common Core State Standards, and the Next Generation Science Standards. Our goal here is to invite you to consider possibilities and make connections. Remember, the quick-fix gold nugget is just an illusion, so we’ll be offering no easy answers or supposedly simple ways to instantly incorporate these complicated ideas into your classroom. Instead, we hope to make more explicit how these various changes relate to one another, and how you can relate these changes to your existing teaching pedagogy.

As we move through these three chapters, we’ll be bringing in some friends to help us out. Remember way back in Chapter 2 when we compared little Jane and John’s teachers? John’s teacher, the one who brought in leaves from outside to teach the students how to observe and analyze, is a teacher who is wise to the game. She’s figured out that shifting perspective isn’t about fancy new toys in the classroom, but about placing the intellectual heavy lifting of each lesson squarely on the shoulders on her students. As a result, her students are more engaged in their lessons and ultimately perform better on state assessments. We’ll call this teacher Ms. Bliss, and she’ll be making a few appearances in the coming chapters.

Now, Jane’s teacher on the other hand, the one who passed out the photocopies of the cell and the fresh pack of colored pencils? This is a teacher who is getting by on the same methods that have served him in the past. His kids are learning at the same rate they always have, and he’s decided that learning a whole new set of tricks just isn’t worth it. He’s an average teacher, one that will consistently write the standard on the board just right and attend all the required faculty meetings, but settles for minimal effort from his students as long as everything is running relatively smoothly. Well call him Mr. Minn and he’ll be joining Ms. Bliss for the ride.

Finally, we’ll have a third teacher joining us, Miss Fire. She’s a tricky one and takes many forms; you may recognize her as a green teacher straight out of a certification program, bursting with enthusiasm but with no clue how to manage a classroom or structure a unit plan. Or, perhaps you identify this teacher with the lifers who’ve taken to handing out worksheets like candy, counting their days until retirement and dismissing any calls for reform as pointless. Teachers like Miss Fire can come in all shapes and sizes, and at every level of the experience scale. The bottom line is that they simply don’t know how to effectively execute in the classroom, and as a result, their students don’t learn.

These three teachers will illustrate some of our points in the chapters to come, because they can all teach us something valuable. Yes, even you, Miss Fire, just as soon as you stop crying into the cupboard over there. Yes, there there. We know that being a teacher is hard, thankless work, especially with all of the new information coming at you, but as you’ll soon see, there truly is a better way to manage all while staying sane and getting results. Everyone ready? Let’s begin.

Chapter 5: Teachers Still Matter: The Case for Content Mastery

“In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

-Malcolm Gladwell, from Outliers: The Story of Success

After a recent faculty meeting, Ms. Bliss, Mr. Minn, and Miss Fire found themselves lingering over the documents they’d been handed. Lists of new state standards, flyers about upcoming professional development sessions, and binders full of new curriculum to absorb.

“This is too much!” said Miss Fire. “How do they ever expect us to do all of this when the kids are still struggling with the basics?”

“Simple,” said Mr. Minn, gesturing with his binder. “Just use the language from this thing in your lessons plans, and keep doing what you know works.”

“But I don’t know what works,” said Miss Fire frantically, “It seems these days that nothing works with these kids. I don’t even know why we bother!”

“Relax,” said Ms. Bliss. She picked up her tote bag and laid a hand on Miss Fire’s shoulder. “You know your content, right? It’s just a different way of looking at it, and a different way of getting the kids to see it.”

Miss Fire shook her head and headed for the door. She wasn’t convinced, and her weekly vocabulary quizzes weren’t going to grade themselves.

“You’ve got the right idea, Bliss,” said Mr. Minn. “It’s the same thing we’ve always been doing. They’re just calling it by different names.”

“Well, not quite,” Ms. Bliss laughed, walking with him to the door. “The way I see it, if I want to get different results from the same students, then I’ve got to be open to using some different strategies in the classroom.”

“Different strategies?” Mr. Minn rolled his eyes. “But you said it yourself, the content is all that matters, right? This stuff is just a bunch of noise.”

“My knowledge of the content is what gives me the confidence to try new things.” Ms. Bliss pushed open the door with her fat binder, the plastic making a loud clunking sound against the safety glass. She laughed and held up the binder . “To me, that’s what makes all this new…stuff feel doable.”

A Lens, Not a Checklist

While Ms. Bliss may come off as something of a Pollyanna here, she’s actually got the right idea. The Common Core and the NGSS certainly do shift the focus from teachers performing to students actually doing, but a confident teacher who is the master of his or her content is still, according to a growing body of research, one of the single most important determiners of student success.

Knowing your content in and out means you can work from a place of deep understanding and flexibility. If, like Ms. Bliss, you feel confident in the subject you teach, then you can roll with whatever punches come your way. Your depth of understanding allows you to create new applications of the material as required by initiatives like the Common Core and the NGSS, and ultimately makes your hard won knowledge more accessible to the students in your classroom. But this level of mastery can be a double edged sword. Hearing about new initiatives can be scary, especially for a teacher who already has several years of experience under their belt. Mr. Minn, and many other teachers like him, believe that they just need to keep doing what they’ve always done because after all, there’s simply nothing new under the sun when it comes to educating students. This mindset seems echoed in Malcom Gladwell’s popular assertion about the supposed “10,000 rule.” By putting in the time, Mr. Minn has become a default expert, so why should he bother changing? To put it bluntly, because he has to.

Change is here, and teachers are forced to make a choice. Either adapt or go the way of Miss Fire and stew in your bitter cocktail of denial and frustration. Look, we know that there’s a lot of new information coming at you, but if you’re committed to student success and content mastery, you’re well on your way to making this shift.

Incorporating STEM activities, Common Core standards and Next Generation standards is no walk in the park, but approaching them as a new lens with which to see your content can truly improve your teaching practice, and, get this, actually make your job easier. Shoehorning a bunch of jargon into your lesson plans won’t actually help students learn the 21st century skills they need any better, and neither will standing in a corner and blindly turning each day’s lesson over to the class.

Nobody Puts Teacher in a Corner

After the faculty meeting, Miss Fire decides to try her hand at adopting some of the new ways. She reads a few sections of her training binder and settles on the idea that terms like “inquiry-based learning” and “staircase of complexity” mean that the students should be essentially learning on their own. Miss Fire decides that it will actually make her job a lot easier if she just has to hand out the assignment, sit back, and make sure no one ends up falling out of their chair.

Now, Miss Fire’s instinct towards working less is not something to knock. In fact, we think that teachers are spending far too much time working hard, and in our final section of this resource, you’ll find several concrete strategies to actually reduce the time you spend on your job. But for now, let’s look at how Miss Fire goes about implementation.

In her 3rd period biology lesson, she hands out discussion questions she’s downloaded from a NGSS resource site. She tells the students to work together until they complete the entire sheet, and then she sits at her desk and begins entering grades for last week’s quiz. The students appear to work diligently, but at the end of the class, many of the students are lost and confused.

“Miss Fire?” one asks, “I still don’t get it. Are humans part of a Phylum or a Kingdom?”

Miss Fire shakes her head. “I’m not allowed to tell you that anymore. You should be able to answer that yourself. You got an A on the quiz!”

“Yeah,” continues the student. “I mean, I can define Phylum and Kingdom, and I know that humans are in the Kingdom Animalia, but are they in a Phylum too?”

Miss Fire shrugs and smiles at the students. “Class dismissed!”

Students need guidance to learn, and neither the Common Core, the NGSS or the push towards including more STEM activities means you have to stop guiding students towards discovery and knowledge. The process of inquiry requires heavy use of the cognitive structures in our brain devoted to working memory, and without clear guidance to help us make meaning, students can quickly max out their ability to process, organize, and store information. 

Research suggests that guidance from a teacher with expert content knowledge is crucial to help students construct meaning, but it’s definitely a fine line to walk. Teachers must provide guidance, but allow students the experience of making connections and thinking deeply. To assume that your role as an instructional leader is somehow less important now that students are required to do more in your classroom will ultimately do a disservice to both your students and your hard-won experience.

Brain Break!: Integer Tag

This grade level wide mathematics activity creates a culture of friendly competition between students and teachers while increasing automaticity with integer calculations. Who can rack up the most correct answers in a single day?

Grade Level: 4-6

Subject: Math

Objective: Increase students' fluency and automaticity with adding and subtracting positive and negative integers.

Procedure:

1. Create slips of paper with simple integer problems written or typed out (ex. -13 + 42). To save teacher prep time, the students may create their own sets of problem slips.

2. Decide how many slips each student and teacher will begin the game with, then distribute sets of slips along with envelopes to collect winning problems.

3. Explain the rules of the game. This activity is designed to build integer fluency during "down times," including hallway transitions, lunch, or recess. The coordinating teacher can set the parameters depending on your particular school; some games can last a week or more, depending on the number of slips distributed. Once the game begins, students "tag" by tapping a fellow student or teacher on the shoulder and exchanging problem slips. Whoever solves their problem the fastest, wins! The loser must sign their name on the winning problem and the winner saves the slip as proof. The player with the most signed slips, wins!

4. BONUS ACTIVITY: Students tally results on a bar graph to determine the winner.

Further Reading

ASCD, https://www.ascd.org
Founded in 1943, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development is a global nonprofit association devoted to providing support for educators and administrators worldwide. The ASCD publishes several resources annually, including books, newsletters, and their magazine, Educational Leadership. The ASCD also offers professional development for teachers at all levels of their careers. Some of these sessions are online webinars, other development opportunities are held in person at conferences and meetings held around the globe. The ASCD also makes courses available via iTunes University and regularly features special topics, including adjusting to the Common Core and 21st Century Skills, which focuses on appropriate and effective implementations of technology in the modern classroom.

To Be Continued...

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