Imagine walking into a classroom to observe a lesson, and finding a discussion that’s just really point. Questions are answered correctly, nobody’s being disruptive, discussions are extended with thought-provoking questions. Teaching that kind of class feels great – everything goes according to plan, and you got to deliver all the material while being “interactive”.
Unfortunately, the third-party observer also catches plenty of stuff the teacher didn’t. In particular, they notice all the people who were out of the spotlight and not answering the questions. (This includes: people who are a little slower to formulate thoughts verbally, or have a higher standard for what they choose to share; people who don’t understand the meaning of a key term and are just confused; people who are too shy; people who are on their phones; or even those who think their peers/the discussion is not worthwhile/dumb, but are too polite to speak up.)
Too often, teachers rely on verbal questioning as a proxy for whether the whole group gets it. It’s about as bad as the scenario where a group leader asks, “do y’all want A or B?”, one person says A (because the others were still thinking, or wondering how on Earth am I supposed to speak for the whole group), and the leader says, “great, let’s do A!” – ridiculous, right? Yet teachers use their S1-impression of flow as a proxy for the quality of the lesson all the time. I’m not trying to point fingers here; I was shocked to find myself guilty of this. (The magnitude of this effect was probably the most shocking experience I had while full-time teaching.) And it’s a hard problem: it’s really nontrivial to gauge how students are doing just by looking at them. The sea of faces looks tired or bored or disengaged; they just have a bunch of neutral expressions on. That doesn’t mean they’re not learning, but it might feel like it.
This tunnel-vision problem isn’t just restricted to discussions and extroverted students. On the flip side, those who are loud and disruptive suck up a lot of attention. In louder classrooms, I notice how the students asking for help or being “disruptive” get 90% of my attention. I was surprised: how is it so difficult to connect to the quieter students, when those are the very people whose situations I most empathize with? Those students often look bored, may not show work, and are generally hard to notice in the crowd. I was only able to identify the students who were in a similar situation to my high school self by circulating during a multiple choice test. How do I best give them a fair share of my attention and care, especially when they’ve been conditioned to disbelieve in the possibility of such a relationship? And on the topic of “disruptive” students: when I was teaching at Chelsea or Tech Boston, students were often out of their seats and talking – learning, just loudly. This doesn’t match my top-down prediction for what a “good classroom where learning is happening” looks like, but it’s what was most comfortable for them. But ultimately, my experiences, S1-impressions, and top-down models of good learning aren’t either accurate or reliable.
So I know these are problems. Currently, I’m working on the following solutions:
To avoid tunnel vision in general, I should videotape my teaching, or invite an observer into the classroom (or some kind of “open door policy”). This would help me see the class more objectively and notice the things I failed to while teaching. It’d also help catch weird(/annoying) tics and monitor the clarity & speed of my presentations. Unfortunately, many schools prohibit videotaping students, even for internal/personal use, and inviting someone in has a ton of prerequisites too including: feeling comfortable in their presences; being on the same page with respect to values, assumptions, beliefs, communication, honesty, trust; etc… To help with class discussions in particular: Explicitly state intent of discussions (hearing from the gestalt, even Increasing wait time after asking a question greatly increases the quality of student responses – something much easier said than done. So let students think/write to themselves before sharing with a partner.Use a variety of formats for eliciting participation, not all verbal Take real anonymous data from students about what’s working and what isn’t Make sure to actually check in with people who look like they’re quietly on task