What Really Matters in the Classroom?

Spoiler Alert: It's not teaching content.

On a recent episode of the Modern Classrooms Podcast, my cohosts and I discussed of the shifting role of the teacher, both in a Modern Classroom, and in general as we strive to improve our teaching. The discussion was rather cathartic, frequently returning to the frustrations the three of us shared in our early careers - principally, the frustration with feeling like we knew what we wanted for our students, but also feeling unable to provide anything even close to our ideals of student-centered, authentic learning environment. As the discussion developed, it dawned on me just how much teachers seem to agree on what actually matters in a classroom, but how much we universally struggle to implement it - and that it's not necessarily teaching our content all the time.

Actually, let me not hedge or bury the lede any further: teaching content is not my priority, especially right now. But even putting aside the pandemic (and the myriad swirling uncertainties and anxieties to which my lessons pale in comparison, making the point of my argument rather obvious), I still think that our biggest priority - what really matters - should be to foster a love of school, a strong academic self-concept, and for our students to feel nurtured and cared for in our classrooms and see school as a part of their identity.

I don't think this is a particularly contentious opinion, but many of the struggles we face as teachers arise from the fact that we focus our time in class pushing our kids to succeed academically when they have other things going on that may or may not be a bigger deal, but are certainly more important to them in the moment. By forcing our content upon them and positioning it in opposition to what matters to them, we degrade its importance in their minds; even if we purport to care about them, we contradict ourselves if we constantly redirect students away from their interests in pursuit of success on some test we wrote. After 13 or 14 years of being told implicitly that their interests (and maybe their trauma) are less important than some numbers and symbols or some grammatical structures, it's not hard to understand why many people don't feel so fondly about school.

Responsive music educators recognize that our job isn't to churn out hundreds of professional musicians every year, and likewise it shouldn't be the job of a Math or English teacher to churn out professional mathematicians or authors or critics (students, of course, will follow their own path after school). I think (maybe I'm wrong) that most teachers know and feel this at least subconsciously, but external pressures are placed on us such that we tend to forget. We seek out strategies for classroom management rather than teaching for mastery or building relationships, focusing on what works without questioning (or at least, without listening to the nagging internal critic who questions everything) whether this is what matters.

There's a disconnect between the amount of professional development we receive on trauma-informed teaching, authentic relationships, and the buzzwordliest of all, Social Emotional Learning, and the way we're evaluated based on student achievement, or more specifically, classroom compliance (classroom management) and grades, which take a great deal of nuance to achieve without alienating students or silencing their voices (this disconnect also plays out in the types of PD teachers prefer and the types they actually receive. I have a future post planned on the kinds of PD I find most valuable, but the data in this report certainly validate the idea that we're evaluated on different standards than what we're trained on - poor pedagogy indeed!).

Of course the tricky bit here is that we do still need to teach our content, and our students need to learn it. While I think that systemically, we might be stuck in a loop where school only exists to teach students how to succeed on tests (particularly high-stakes tests) that school itself imposes on them, teachers themselves do aspire to develop kids' critical thinking skills and impart to them the knowledge and understanding that will bring them success as adults. It strikes me that our priorities (and the world of standardized testing) tend to focus on teaching students what to know rather than how to think. It feels like ubiquitous, common knowledge that kids just forget content after the test (and it might be true).

So, what does really matter then? How can a teacher, in his classroom or in her Zoom call tomorrow, put their students' needs before their content, while still pushing students toward mastery and academic growth but without pushing them away from a love of learning? I know how frustrating it is as a new teacher to hear "build authentic relationships with kids," and it's taken me until now (my fifth year) to actually understand what it means, so let's avoid that buzzword and get right to the nitty-gritty. Here's what to do: if a kid wants to talk to you about soccer during independent work time on some practice problems, listen to her for a few minutes. If some kids start blowing up your Zoom chat asking "who's the imposter" (it's from Among Us), play along for a little. If a student wants to tell you all about Fortnite or asks you who your favorite rapper is but you know she has a sentence to diagram, let it go and indulge her, even just for a bit. Listen to them. It humanizes you, and in their eyes, you are school, so you'll be modeling what it looks like when school becomes a place to be heard. Afterwards, you can direct these kids back to work, but they'll remember that you made their interests compatible with learning by making some time for them during class - time spent building relationships is not time lost . After 13 or 14 years of that, I can only imagine the kinds of curious, inquisitive young adults we'll see coming out of our schools and taking on the world as truly lifelong learners.

You can listen to this post as an audio podcast, here: