I’ve been thinking a lot lately about authentic audiences for my students’ work. Most often, a teacher is the immediate audience, though not always an authentic one. Parents, too, are an traditional audience for student work, but their authenticity waxes and wanes with their children’s relationships with them. Because of communications technology and social media, friends – and strangers, too – are becoming a more authentic audience for our students’ work inside and outside school as they text, “friend” one another, and post media. Taking advantage of students’ media savvy and enjoyment of social learning has therefore become one way to foster authentic engagement with content in the classroom.
B&S Fans by acb
But what about teachers? Who is our authentic audience, and does our behavior reflect its primacy in our professional lives? For whom do we perform teaching? Recent #edchat about standardized testing and the nation’s discourse about President Obama’s speech to students have turned on the house lights. From the stage we can look out and see our students, but also their parents and our leaders, law-makers, and tax-payers.
Our act requires many types of improvisation. When we see a great idea, we have to adapt it to our circumstances. When we see a students’ needs, we have to differentiate instruction to meet them. When we hear our parent’s and policy-makers’ and public’s shouts, we have to decide what we stand for and how we stand for it.
In this light, in so many ways, neither Obama’s speech (see: Reagan) nor the talk about it are new. Our students, parents, and leaders call for us to act in conflicting ways all the time. The sound and fury of public discourse is really a repeated call to us in our moments of history to decide for ourselves what we value in our work and to act in accordance with our decisions instead of in compromise away from them. At the very least, our moment asks us to push teaching and learning past the tests and to make them personally meaningful for our students. No generation, president, or political party has gotten this right. We won’t get it right unless we face up to our own responsibility to reform classroom practice.
A dear principal of mine began every year encouraging us to work smarter because he believed we couldn’t work any harder. I hear him every time I read a blog post celebrating a teacher’s sense of accomplishment at getting all the students lined up and silent in the hall.
Rules will not eliminate the achievement gap. Orderly lines of complacent children will not improve graduation rates. Standardized tests will not stand the test of time. Our best measure of success will be our students’ lives, not their scores, and the lives of their children. If we don’t find ways to make learning matter to students now, the next generation will have the same views of school and the same mistrust of teachers.
Democratic nominee Barack Obama by Wa-J
Whether we watch Obama’s speech during school on Tuesday or not, our real task is to make what we do as authentically engaging to students as this debate has been to us. We need to switch places with the students and let them perform work inspired by their talents and passions. We need to broaden students’ sense of audience and introduce them to mentors and coaches who have better ideas than we do about how schoolwork connects to the professional lives students want to lead. We need to teach in a way that seems authentic to students who are no longer the audience, but the performers.
The purpose of school shouldn’t be to teach kids how to live inside or outside the lines of a police state. If a school’s grounds and halls need to be patrolled for safety’s sake, then by all means patrol them, but in any school classrooms should be oases. Learning should be a refuge. It should take work to learn, but the work should be joyous and different from the fear-coerced compromises too many students have to make to survive physically, mentally, and emotionally. Teachers: we can’t meet every kid’s every need, but I remain convinced we can do more individually to change the way we teach to address students’ needs for safety, belonging, liberty power, and, yes, fun in the classroom. If we believe in the American Dream, if we believe in rugged individualism, and if we believe in a future where government is smaller because it is truthfully needed less, then it’s time to stop looking for students and parents and tax-payers and policy-makers to change the world. It’s time to change our classrooms, aquí mero, and to prove right the trust we want to teach and learn joyfully with our students in the brief time we have with them. Do right by today’s students, and their parents and children will thank you for it. Decide, teach authentically, and don’t be afraid.
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