Creating Student Advocates

This past year, I worked on a personal inquiry which I titled "Building Capacity for Differentiation through Student Voice." My idea was that, if I taught kids about some of the tools that could help them with their learning, and encouraged their teachers to allow their students to make choices on an ongoing basis, the teachers would provide more choice, and the students would be more successful. I had a hunch it couldn't quite be this simple, but I needed a premise to start from.

The next thing I knew, I was in a number of classrooms working with some amazing educators and learning a ton from their kids. We explored Google Chrome tools, and had kids summarizing, listening to text out loud, collaborating over shared documents. One student came in after her weekend and insisted that we HAD to get Evernote because that was what she was going to start using to hand things in and capture her notes. We had other students articulately explaining why they needed color on their graphic organizers, and preferred that to lined paper. It was very clear, right away, that the kids knew what helped them learn, and were excited by the feeling of accomplishment that came from doing things independently.

The crunch came in trying to sustain things. In a couple of classrooms, the students were keen to try the tools when they were introduced, were proficient with them when encouraged to use them, but then things started to get dusty and fall away once they were left as "choices" on an ongoing basis. I spent some time dissecting this with a couple of teaching colleagues, and learned some important things:


           1. Students need us. Becoming a self-advocate takes time and practice.  The kids who are the most successful self-advocates are the ones who have had MULTIPLE teachers encourage and support them over time.

          2. Even the strongest self-advocates need to be in an environment where advocacy is encouraged and the learning environment is flexible.

           3. Teachers WANT students who are self-advocates, but often see this as a student responsibility, not theirs. There is an assumption students don’t “like” or “need” the tools because they are not asking for them.

          4.  The kids who most need us are the ones who advocate through their BEHAVIOUR, not their WORDS. We need to be expert listeners to hear what they are saying. You can’t ask for help if you don’t even know you have a question.

It wasn't enough to introduce the tools, and then let the students know they could use them whenever they wanted.  It is a complex layering of options where they are continually reminded to think about which tool and why.  Something they choose for a poetry assignment won't pop out as an option for a social studies project unless students are taught that it's flexible enough to work for both tasks.  Knowing they are allowed to choose something Tuesday doesn't result in remembering about it on Thursday.  Being able to use it with the Block A teacher doesn't mean they see it as an option in Block B.

The classrooms where I saw the most powerful student advocates emerge were the places where the teachers set aside time to talk about the tools in deliberate, focused ways.  For example, in her grade 10 class,  Trish Cathrine holds check-in/check-outs around a Thinking Toolkit she creates with her students, so they can talk about "Which tool today?," and "How did it work out?"  The content of the assignment is important, for sure-  but so is understanding your role as a learner and the tools that support you.  In this classroom, assignments are based around big questions, and everyone is not just allowed, but is expected, to pick a tool that fits.

 

Trish does a great job describing how this approach has supported the learners in her classroom: 

 (If you can't see the video here, link to it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq3wbsasNZo). 

 

We're committed as an educational community.  The teachers I worked with were all more than willing to allow students to try out different tools - I sensed a lot of excitement around providing personalized options for kids and letting them find their path.  The students like to feel successful and are keen to explore the tools, but most lack the confidence to approach teachers and ask to use them when they are not deliberately invited to do so.  For me, this is a great first step toward personalizing learning in our classrooms.

If we open the door, consistently, for our kids to reflect on the how and why of their learning by making good choices in terms of their tools, we have provided an opportunity for them to be in the driver's seat and take responsibility for their journey.  We don't have to know how to use all of the tools.  My experience has been that there's almost always someone in the room who can figure things out (even in grade 3!), and when there isn't, the kids are willing to wait while things get sorted out.

It doesn't always need to be high-tech.  For example, offering a "draw, write or tell" choice for a reading response assignment makes a huge difference, compared to the traditional task of writing "5 sentences in a journal."  I've seen some detailed, complex images from some students who find it exceedingly difficult to write sentences.  Drawing gave them the freedom to reflect on the text and really think about what mattered, rather than focusing on the laborious formation of letters and sentences.  In the same lesson, a couple of students chose a comic-book approach, while others wrote their sentences in a journal.  I got to have conversations with a bunch of kids about their ideas, rather than spending my time with one or two kids at a back table.  Everyone's in when you do it this way - even when there's only one adult in the room.

Over the next few weeks, I will share some specific student stories about things that worked for the students, and their thinking around their choices.  I'll also share some information about the tools that we used, and how it worked out.

My goal in starting the conversation today is to get us all thinking about ways we can build in a little bit of choice for our kids as we start up this fall.  We don't have to throw away everything we know and understand-  there are a lot of great things happening in classrooms.  But every opportunity we give to our learners for them to choose their tool helps them to build resiliency and confidence, and creates a little bit of independence.   When our students can produce work on their own, we get to spend more time talking with students and helping them go further and deeper, instead of spending our time scrambling around trying to help kids get "something" done.

We can help each other, too.  They're All Our Kids.