Sometimes The Students School The Teachers

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Twenty-seven seconds.  That’s how long I waited before the girl answered my question.  I know because the technology director sent me a link to the videos he created of the demo lessons, and I timed it myself.

I have been observing two sixth grade teachers as part of some PD I am doing in their school.  It’s been a great experience, though I don’t think they realize how much I have learned from them.  Anyway, after several observations, the time came for me to teach or co-teach their classes, lessons we had co-planned that built upon established units, the teachers’ strengths, and the existing cultures of the classrooms.

We asked the students to read some essays written by slightly older students (one from Teen Ink and one from Time for Kids), and then asked them to analyze the essays’ organization.  The kids were familiar with a five-paragraph stack  from Empowering Writers, and we adapted that, asking students to draw boxes around paragraphs or groups of paragraphs in authentic essays and to then describe what those paragraphs were doing, and how they were doing it.

Twenty-seven seconds does not strike me as very long, and in fact at the time I didn’t feel that I was waiting an especially long time for the girl to answer, but in the break-out session, many of the teachers remarked on how long I had waited.  One direktur even said, “Yeah, it was starting to get uncomfortable.” 

One teacher asked why I was so confident that the girl was going to say something worthwhile—which she did.  I answered that I hadn’t thought about it, but I suppose that since she had volunteered, I was confident that she would have something insightful to say, at least something that I could work with.

There was another student I called on that surprised us, a boy I had conferred with during independent work time.  He was one of several boys seated in the back who looked to me to be doing everything possible to avoid the assignment, so I made a bee line for them.  When I asked them questions, they were stonily silent.  When I didn’t give them the answers or walk away but instead kept asking questions, they gave tepid answers that weren’t half bad.  Once we got to the sharing part of the lesson, I asked those boys if any of them would share, and one did, and he did fine.

Someone asked why I called on such a reluctant student to demonstrate something to his classmates.  I said, “Well, when I asked if any of those boys would volunteer, three buried their chins in their chests but that one made eye contact with me and even smirked, so I went with it.”

Later, we learned that those boys are not normally in that class but were from a mostly self-contained special ed class and had only been placed there because my demo lessons had caused some coverage issues.  They were, supposedly, non-readers. 

In the other class, which I co-taught, a couple of our volunteers were boys who apparently are usually some of the more disruptive kids.  Perhaps they were just having fun with a guest or maybe they were responding to a male instructor (me), but I suspect they also may have liked being given the opportunity to play expert, to go to the front of the class and “teach” their classmates.  Regardless of the reason, those boys did a nice job and their teacher was pleasantly surprised and impressed.

My goals for that day’s lessons were to use authentic writing as mentor texts, to engage the students in an activity that was more descriptive of what writers do than prescriptive of what writers should do, and to be student-centered.  I think I accomplished all of those goals, but I also think we learned a couple other unintended lessons.

One would be about faith and patience.  Why did I call on the kid in back whose teeth I practically had to pull to get an answer during a conference?  Because he made eye contact when I asked.  Why did I wait twenty-seven seconds for a girl to re-read three paragraphs to herself before answering?  Because her volunteering signaled to me that she had confidence in her ideas.

Another related lesson would be about the preconceived notions we hold about kids.  I had few because I had only observed those classes once or twice before and so I knew little to nothing about the students.  The result was that I ended up with unexpected volunteers.  Special ed?  Non-reader?  Rowdy?  Disruptive?  I had no idea, which turned out to be a good thing.