Recently I’ve been thinking about how I can better meet the individual needs of my students. I teach music to about 600, k-5 students. I would imagine that designing individual work for 30 students would be difficult, but designing it for 600 I’ve found exceedingly difficult. In the past I’ve thought about what the majority of the class can do, how I can help the struggling students, and how I can push the more advanced students. Essentially coming up with three slightly tweaked lessons for every class I taught. It was exhausting and I was not meeting the needs of every student in my classroom.
Recently I have been reading a book called Boy Writers by Ralph Fletcher. I’m not a writing teacher but I love reading and learning about the readers/writers workshop model. He does a great job at honestly discussing the difficulties of teaching this specific subset of writing students and lays out helpful ways to meet them where they are, instead of trying to force them into a mold they do not fit. Helping students construct their knowledge through the process of creation is a passion of mine. In Boy Writers Ralph also talks briefly about flow. I’ve read about flow before and have felt it happen sporadically in my classroom. Flow according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is when the difficulty of a task meets a person’s ability to complete it. The result is extremely high engagement. It is because of the engagement learning happens fast, and it happens deep. The kids get it. This graph is from Ralph’s Book, p. 31
The diagram does a fantastic job at showing what happens when the task is too difficult, or too easy. I’ve seen both happen in my classroom during the same project. 2/3 of my class might be in flow 1/6th might be drowning and the last 1/6th is bored.
That has been my problem up to this point. I was meeting the needs of most of my students and tweaking it for the rest of them. The tweaking seemed inauthentic to them. “Why do I have to do more?” one might say or even worse the kids who need to concentrate on a smaller piece of the broad concept may feel like they’re behind, like they’ll never get to the full understanding that they are supposed to have. Something I’ve wrestled with for a few years now.
I started to think more deeply at a professional development session led by Ron Ritchhart, co-author of Making Thinking Visible. He said that we need to create projects that have a low threshold and a high ceiling. In other words projects that are easy enough for all of your kids to do, but don’t put limits on them.
No more, “Your diorama must have three dinosaurs and three plants that lived in the Triassic period”. With those directions you won’t have a single student who takes what you’re learning about food chains and maps out how the food chain worked (or may have worked) in the Triassic period. They’re going to have three dinosaurs and three plants and it’s probably going to look bad because they were bored. It was not meeting their needs as learners. They already understood that things that no longer exist today existed together back then. Students need more autonomy over their learning. They need to understand that they are the arbiters of their own knowledge. “What did the world look like in the Triassic period?” would be a much more open ended prompt. Could a student design a diorama with three dinosaurs and three plants? Yes. Could they make a complete food chain? Yes. Could they make a model in Minecraft? Yes. They can design their own learning process with our help. They can create their own zone of flow.
My students have always had tons of autonomy in my classroom. They made decisions about what music we learned. They help with the day to day processes of class. We genuinely work together. Before this year I had never tried giving them autonomy over the design of the learning.
Now instead of designing a project for the entire class that meets the needs of most, at the end of a unit, we have a conversation. How can you show your understanding of what we just learned? Ok, go! Every student designs a plan that shows their understanding of the concept. Sometimes they choose to write a song as a class. Sometimes they choose to work individually with acoustic instruments. Sometimes they work in small groups on iPads. The end result is they own the learning space. They care about what happens in my room. They are in flow.