I wrote about the conference I attended last week. Great PD, lots of sessions, and some inspiration. One of the presenters that sttod out asked the audience a great questions, how is practice different than a classroom? He asked us to imagine that a JV coach walked into practice and saw two students sitting on the side while everyone else ran sprints. The JV coach walks over to the head coach and ask why they are not running. The head coach responds, “they don’t feel like it today.” We laughed, because that is ridiculous. Anyone who has been a coach, watched practice, or played on a team knows you can’t choose to not do something and expect to be a part of the team. Then he asked us to imagine a classroom where everyone is solving problems, but two students had their heads down and were not doing anything. This time no one laughed because that is not unreasonable. Whether we have seen it in our own classes or others around the school, it is not unthinkable for students to be disengaged in a classroom setting. How ridiculous is this though. We expect more from students in sports practice than we do in the classroom? This should not be the norm. The presenter argued students do what we let them do. He is right. Students will put their heads down because they are bored, but a student’s head will stay down because we let them keep it down. If we do not demand more from them, they will not give us more. We he argued is that failure needs to be painful. In practice, if you do something wrong, athletes are punished for it. In class, when students do something wrong or do not do an assignment we give them a zero and who is that really hurting? Students? NO, let’s be real, how often does that motivate students to do more. He argues zeros and missing grades have to really impact students, they have to really want to avoid them. We tell students to do things all the time, but do not make them do it. Rarely. We have to motivate, encourage, and incentivize them. Coaches do not just focus on the negative, they reward and celebrate the positive.
There are a few lessons we can take from the coaching handbook. His classroom had success. In his algebra 1 class where 100% of the students failed 8th grade math, every single one passed his class. His students learned, they did their work, and they even turned in their homework. So clearly it worked for him. Would it work in DISD though, would it work your school? We can’t know until we try, but what I do know is we can’t keep making excuses for students. We can’t continue to pass them when they have failed. We need to start believing students can and will do the work, then we hold them accountable to that work. Maybe getting our students to do something can lead to some real progress in DISD too.
There are a few lessons we can take from the coaching handbook. His classroom had success. In his algebra 1 class where 100% of the students failed 8th grade math, every single one passed his class. His students learned, they did their work, and they even turned in their homework. So clearly it worked for him. Would it work in DISD though, would it work your school? We can’t know until we try, but what I do know is we can’t keep making excuses for students. We can’t continue to pass them when they have failed. We need to start believing students can and will do the work, then we hold them accountable to that work. Maybe getting our students to do something can lead to some real progress in DISD too.
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